Hello,
I have a three monitor setup with a Club 3D MST hub connected to the displayport on my Lenovo Thinkpad W530 and they don’t display right.
The GPU seems to have a hard time initialising and maintaining a consistent connection to the screens. I have tried a multitude of linux drivers, but none solve the problem. It only changes the behaviour of the problem a bit.
When logging into X, a random permutation of the three screens turn on, only become black/blank, have noise on them or simply don’t turn on. Xrandr reports all three screens are present and also states they are enabled. The same is true for the NVidia control panel.
I have to do one of these things:
- Repeat logging out (sometimes reloading the NVidia module, rebooting or cold booting) and logging back in to be able to turn them all on.
- Unplug the cable from my laptop and plug it back in twice (with the 331.20 driver)
- Unplug and plug it back in and change to another TTY and change back to X.
I have to / can repeat these processes until all the screen are displaying again without noise.
A solution can work or not, when repeated for a while. When repeated too often, something the system/kernel/X simply freezes/crashes, without even being able to panic or oops.
When I have succeeded in having a desktop with three monitors displaying, some of them can display white noise/snow and some might turn off and on (after seconds to minutes) after a while or turn off and never turn on again. The randomly turning off or becoming blank seems to occur more often when that screen had noise on it.
Switching to the TTY and back to X changes the situation, but in most cases only changes the state of the problem. And doesn’t change any more if repeated.
(The only driver I found able to detect hot-plugging of the screens was the 331.20 versions and this version is masked in portage.)
I have connected Club 3D, these problems point at a low bandwidth problem, but according to the specs of my videocard/laptop this should not be problem and the setup can work fine for quite some time. Changing the power settings in the control panel to Prefer maximum performance seems to reduce the occurrence of the problems, but they remain present.
Mode switching from a TTY to X with the NVidia driver takes up to 10-30 seconds.
The only things I can find in the syslog:
- a ACPI warning when loading the nvidia module “ACPI Warning: _SB_.PCI0.PEG_.VID_._DSM: Argument #4 type mismatch - Found [Buffer], ACPI requires [Package] (20130725/nsarguments-95)”
- a thinkpad driver issue when changing TTY: “thinkpad_acpi: asked for hotkey mask 0x0070ffbf, but firmware forced it to 0x0070ffbb”
Cheers,
leipie
nvidia-bug-report.log.gz (327 KB)