[ltp] E575 screen freezing (was:) Re: Dual-boot with Windows 10

[Alex Deucher]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2021 at 6:26 AM cr <cr at orcon.net.nz> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 26 Apr 2021 08:46:02 +0300
> Marius Gedminas <marius at gedmin.as> wrote:
>
> > On Mon, Apr 26, 2021 at 12:33:54PM +1200, cr wrote:
> > > When Debian (10.9.0 AMD64) first boots up, everything works.   But
> > > if I go to run e.g. Synaptic, it draws the first window and then
> > > freezes, with it part-drawn. The mouse pointer moves but nothing
> > > else works, keyboard, mouseclicks, nothing.   As if it's jammed
> > > up. Capslock toggles its light.   No key combinations have any
> > > effect. I don't think it's a keyboard issue though.   Only escape
> > > is the power button.
> >
> > Wait, even Alt+SysRq+S,U,B doesn't do anything?
> >
> > Is it enabled in /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq?
>
> No Sysrq key on E575, according to Lenovo Fn+S does the same thing.
> And no, Fn+S or Alt+Fn+S had no effect.
> /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq  just says "438"
>
> >
> > > I have ssh'd in.   And that keeps working even when the E575's
> > > screen is jammed.   So wifi is still working.  Very handy as I can
> > > view lspci, /var/log etc.
> > >
> > > Yet, if I first launch LibreOffice Writer instead, which I assume
> > > is a memory-hungry app, it works fine, at least for a while.   If I
> > > launch a terminal window I can carry on inside it for ages.   So it
> > > seems to be something in the window manager that's getting stuck.
> >
> > Sounds like a bug in the graphics driver is causing your GPU to freeze
> > maybe?  Any interesting messages in dmesg when the GUI is frozen?
> > What sort of video card does the machine have -- Intel, AMD, NVidia?
>
> Video controller is AMD Carrizo, video card is Radeon R5, kernel driver
> is amdgpu, and apparently it has 2 CPU cores and 4 GPU cores.
>
> > > (Now, something must have timed out, as the screen started to fade,
> > > moving the mouse brought it back and the Task Manager window popped
> > > up.   Showing CPU usage 12%, memory 396MB of 7441 MB used.   All
> > > tasks showing 0% CPU%.   But I still can't scroll it, move it or do
> > > anything else with it.)
> >
> > (This rules out what would've been my first guess, swapping to death.)
>
> Would have been my first guess too.   (Anecdote - my father's first PC
> was a 386-20 with minimum RAM and a 20MB(?) hard drive that someone had
> put Win95 and Doublespace on it.   When you went to a new page in Word
> you could watch the letters appearing one by one on the screen as the
> hard drive thrashed itself to death caching and uncompressing...)
>
> > > (Must run memtest but I doubt it's RAM-related, that would be too
> > > easy)
> > >
> > > I updated the BIOS (first time I ever flashed a BIOS.   Lenovo
> > > provide a Windows updater but also, to their credit, a bootable
> > > ISO.  I couldn't get it to boot off USB - probably something I did
> > > worng making the USB stick - but it did boot off a CD).   But no
> > > change to the problem.
> >
> > Oh yeah, I'm so happy Lenovo provides BIOS updates via fwupd for their
> > more recent machines.
> >
> > Marius Gedminas
>
> Progress (of a sort).   The errors were
> IOAPIC[4] not in IVRS table
> IOAPIC[5] not in IVRS table
> No Southbridge IOAPIC found

These are sbios bugs.  Windows didn't productize IOMMU for client
parts in that timeframe so there were some sbioses where the IOMMU
ACPI tables were buggy.  Best bet is to disable the IOMMU in those
cases or you might try a newer sbios if one is available for your
platform.

Alex

>
> So (after much Googling) I tried adding (in /etc/default/grub) the boot
> parameter  ivrs_oapic[4]=00:14.0    -  no change seen.
> Nor for  iommu=soft   or  ivrs_oapic[4]=00:00.2  ivrs_oapic[5]=00:14.0
> or  intremap=off  -  none of those had any effect.
>
> However, Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE4) runs fine off USB, though its
> syslog file shows the exact same IOAPIC errors.
>
> And I found LMDE4 will install to a UEFI partitioning scheme, I just
> hadn't clicked the right box when I tried yesterday.   And it has
> NO additional kernel boot parameters in default/grub.   So now I have a
> working Debian-derived LMDE installation in /sda3 and Debian in /sda2,
> so I should (hopefully) be able to discover what Mint does to make it
> work in this system.
>
> I'll post again if I do.
>
> Thanks and regards to all
>
> Chris
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