Running Linux Mint 21.3 EDGE Cinnamon iso. Linux kernel 6.5.0-41. Not sure what happened here or what the cause was, occasionally happens when using Firefox. It’ll bug out like this for a few seconds, then when I move my curser over it everything goes back to normal.

I’ve also experienced an issue where, when opening a tab or doing something in Firefox (usually Google docs), the entire system will randomly do a partial reboot? best way I can explain it is it’ll go black, flash (what I assume is) the BIOS terminal screen, then load in my lock screen; all my open softwares will have closed out and I’d have to open it again. Idk if the system is rebooting fully when this happens or not but it sure as hell feels like it.

Are these related? are they Firefox issues or is something fucky with my drivers?

I’ve verified everything is up to date like 6 times just in case.

Update: Have not personally resolved either issue. unsure if they are unrelated. I can’t seem to replicate the issue, unsure if they will be resolved by a random update or not, though the issues do seem to be fairly recent and known about; see comments for what I found on the Internet.

  • Consti@lemmy.world
    13·
    5 months ago

    When everything closes, are you sure that’s the lock screen and not the login screen? It sounds like cinnamon is crashing, which means you’re automatically switched back to the display manager (login screen). This can sometimes show the boot logo while it’s switching, happens on my laptop as well, noy sure why that is. If it is crashing, you might find the cause in the logs, run journalctl -e and dmesg to check for errors

    • ComicalMayhem@lemmy.worldOP
      7·
      5 months ago

      yeah you’re correct, it is the login screen and not the lock screen. it just happened again while I was leaving my laptop running and playing music. I’ll run those commands in a little bit, otherwise occupied atm

    • ComicalMayhem@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      5 months ago

      I checked the logs. I really don’t know how to use journalctl -e at all, so I’m just going to mention what I found on dmesg. It reported a number of errors, though they were mostly the same. This one came up pretty often:

      [drm:link_enc_cfg_validate [amdgpu]] *ERROR* link_enc_cfg_validate: Invalid link encoder assignments - 0x1c

      and these two come up a number of times, always together:

      [drm:amdgpu_job_timedout [amdgpu]] *ERROR* ring sdma0 timeout, signaled seq=13767, emitted seq=13769 [drm:amdgpu_job_timedout [amdgpu]] *ERROR* Process information: process pid 0 thread pid 0

      I got an error for the bluetooth a couple times too: Bluetooth: hci0: Failed to read codec capabilities (-22), and this other one only came up once iirc: hub 6-0:1.0: config failed, hub doesn't have any ports! (err -19)

      I don’t think the hub or the bluetooth errors have anything to do with the crashes, so I looked up the first error, the invalid encoder assignment one, and found this thread from a few days ago, though it doesn’t seem to have any solid answers other than rolling back to an older linux. Most recent post seems to be from 2 hours ago lol, I guess this is a really new issue?

  • ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org
    5·
    5 months ago

    HP laptop… That looks exactly like my stupid HP laptop with a stupid AMD Vega 6 chipset when it randomly craps its own display when opening the lid and waking up.

    My solution is to keep the kernel woefully outdated at the last revision that seems to create the least problems. I can give you the exact version number when I get back home if you want.

  • Wahots@pawb.social
    3·
    5 months ago

    Reminds me of r/Ooer back in the 10s, haha. No idea why that’s happening though, never seen anything like that.

  • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
    3·
    5 months ago

    I’ve had VMs do this if not enough vram were allocated.

    Since this is running on metal, I’d say check BIOS settings to see if you can dedicate additional memory to video/GPU. This is a pretty common feature for laptops and desktops with integrated graphics.

    Following that, see if there may be a better non-free driver for your graphics. I’d recommend getting lspci output if you don’t know what chipset it is. What model is the laptop?

    What you’re explaining re: partial reboot sounds like your window/display manager crashing.

    • ComicalMayhem@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      5 months ago

      The specific laptop model is HP Laptop 15-fc0025dx. It’s an AMD Radeon graphics card; lspci lists the vga compatible controller as a Mendocino (rev c1), which this link seems to tell me is used in the AMD Radeon 610M. Unsure how to dedicate additional memory to the gpu from the BIOS (still a linux scrub lol), but checking on some dmesg errors reveals there seems to be a recent bug with a link encoder assignment (whatever that means). More details in this comment: https://lemmy.world/comment/10811232

  • s12@sopuli.xyz
    2·
    5 months ago

    Not sure about the closing everything issue. I’ve not had that. But for graphical issues; it often helps to restart cinnamon by pressing alt-F2 (or sometimes Fn+alt+F2), typing “r”, then pressing enter.

    Not sure if that would help for the kind of problems you’re having though.

    • palordrolap@kbin.run
      2·
      5 months ago

      If that’s the login or lock screen, Cinnamon won’t be handling them.

      As for restarting Cinnamon, Alt+F2, r, Enter is the mild restart. There’s also a deeper restart accessible through Melange, Cinammon’s debugger.

      By default, it’s bound to Meta+L and in its bottom right drop-down, there is an option to Restart Cinnamon.

      What’s the difference? For one it definitely clears up zombie child processes that Cinnamon might be ignoring. (It might have also ironed out refresh rate issues and screen-tearing that the milder restart didn’t help with, but my setup has changed a bit since then.)

      Always worth a try if the first one doesn’t seem to sort a problem out. Definitely worth it when the next two options are log out and back in, or reboot.

      (Just be careful when clicking because the next menu option is “Crash Cinnamon”.)

  • gr3q
    1·
    5 months ago

    I have the same issue on my laptop, except it’s constant from the moment I log into Cinnamon. Other DEs are fine.

    In the end I was too lazy to troubleshoot it, but maybe I’ll try with the Wayland session. If that has the same issue, something’s gone terribly wrong.