Screen dies and becomes unresponsive, leaving my computer unusable without a forced shutdown

Hi!
For the past few days, my screen has randomly died (become black and unresponsive with only a white stripe) with no common pattern to it. The only pattern I’ve had, is that it happened a lot right after I went into the display manager today and happened both if I tried to use the display manager and if I swapped over to tty and tried to log in from there.

I was able to boot and log in using the Advanced options > Fallback initramfs from grub, though I have no idea why this is. I encountered the same bug a few times yesterday before it magically stopped when I finally got an ssh server up and running to test if my system was still responsive when it happened.

It hasn’t been to big of an issue until today, where I haven’t even been able to log in. At first I thought this would just be a one-time thing, but clearly this is something bigger than what I first thought.

Here’s a video showcasing how my system becomes unresponsive and one showcasing it happening before I’m able to log in:

System information:

DE: i3wm
DM: Lightdm, default EndeavourOS i3 install

[endeavour@endeavour ~]$ sudo inxi -FxxxZ
System:
  Host: endeavour Kernel: 6.4.6-arch1-1 arch: x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc
    v: 13.1.1 Desktop: i3 v: 4.22 info: i3bar dm: LightDM v: 1.32.0
    Distro: EndeavourOS base: Arch Linux
Machine:
  Type: Laptop System: LENOVO product: 20X2S0DL00 v: ThinkPad L14 Gen 2
    serial: PF2Z5KDL Chassis: type: 10 serial: PF2Z5KDL
  Mobo: LENOVO model: 20X2S0DL00 v: SDK0J40700 WIN serial: L1HF15S00Y7
    UEFI: LENOVO v: R1JET46W (1.46 ) date: 06/21/2021
Battery:
  ID-1: BAT0 charge: 14.6 Wh (52.0%) condition: 28.1/45.0 Wh (62.5%)
    power: 8.1 W volts: 11.2 min: 11.1 model: LGC 5B10W13894 type: Li-poly
    serial: 5736 status: discharging cycles: 906
CPU:
  Info: dual core model: 11th Gen Intel Core i3-1115G4 bits: 64 type: MT MCP
    smt: enabled arch: Tiger Lake rev: 1 cache: L1: 160 KiB L2: 2.5 MiB
    L3: 6 MiB
  Speed (MHz): avg: 1964 high: 3000 min/max: 400/4100 volts: 1.0 V
    ext-clock: 100 MHz cores: 1: 3000 2: 3000 3: 1203 4: 655 bogomips: 23968
  Flags: avx avx2 ht lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx
Graphics:
  Device-1: Intel Tiger Lake-LP GT2 [UHD Graphics G4] vendor: Lenovo
    driver: i915 v: kernel arch: Gen-12.1 ports: active: eDP-1 empty: DP-1,
    DP-2, DP-3, DP-4, HDMI-A-1 bus-ID: 00:02.0 chip-ID: 8086:9a78
    class-ID: 0300
  Device-2: IMC Networks Integrated Camera driver: uvcvideo type: USB
    rev: 2.0 speed: 480 Mb/s lanes: 1 bus-ID: 3-7:2 chip-ID: 13d3:56ff
    class-ID: 0e02
  Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 21.1.8 compositor: Picom v: git-b700a
    driver: X: loaded: modesetting alternate: fbdev,intel,vesa dri: iris
    gpu: i915 display-ID: :0 screens: 1
  Screen-1: 0 s-res: 1920x1080 s-dpi: 96 s-size: 508x285mm (20.00x11.22")
    s-diag: 582mm (22.93")
  Monitor-1: eDP-1 model: AU Optronics 0x0b93 res: 1920x1080 hz: 60 dpi: 158
    size: 309x174mm (12.17x6.85") diag: 355mm (14") modes: 1920x1080
  API: OpenGL v: 4.6 Mesa 23.1.4 renderer: Mesa Intel UHD Graphics (TGL GT2)
    direct-render: Yes
Audio:
  Device-1: Intel Tiger Lake-LP Smart Sound Audio vendor: Lenovo
    driver: sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl bus-ID: 00:1f.3 chip-ID: 8086:a0c8
    class-ID: 0401
  API: ALSA v: k6.4.6-arch1-1 status: kernel-api
  Server-1: PipeWire v: 0.3.75 status: n/a (root, process) with:
    1: pipewire-pulse status: active 2: wireplumber status: active
    3: pipewire-alsa type: plugin 4: pw-jack type: plugin
Network:
  Device-1: Intel Ethernet I219-V vendor: Lenovo driver: e1000e v: kernel
    port: N/A bus-ID: 00:1f.6 chip-ID: 8086:15fc class-ID: 0200
  IF: enp0s31f6 state: down mac: 38:f3:ab:ea:50:3c
  Device-2: Realtek RTL8852AE 802.11ax PCIe Wireless Network Adapter
    vendor: Lenovo driver: rtw89_8852ae v: kernel pcie: speed: 2.5 GT/s lanes: 1
    port: 3000 bus-ID: 09:00.0 chip-ID: 10ec:8852 class-ID: 0280
  IF: wlan0 state: up mac: 74:4c:a1:db:44:bd
Bluetooth:
  Device-1: Realtek Bluetooth Radio driver: btusb v: 0.8 type: USB rev: 1.0
    speed: 12 Mb/s lanes: 1 bus-ID: 3-10:3 chip-ID: 0bda:4852 class-ID: e001
    serial: 00e04c000001
  Report: bt-adapter note: tool can't run ID: hci0 rfk-id: 1 state: down
    bt-service: disabled rfk-block: hardware: no software: no address: N/A
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 238.47 GiB used: 13.79 GiB (5.8%)
  ID-1: /dev/nvme0n1 vendor: Toshiba model: N/A size: 238.47 GiB
    speed: 31.6 Gb/s lanes: 4 tech: SSD serial: 11KF776AFDK3 fw-rev: 5108AGLA
    temp: 31.9 C scheme: GPT
Partition:
  ID-1: / size: 152.94 GiB used: 13.76 GiB (9.0%) fs: btrfs
    dev: /dev/nvme0n1p4
  ID-2: /boot/efi size: 256 MiB used: 28.2 MiB (11.0%) fs: vfat
    dev: /dev/nvme0n1p1
  ID-3: /home size: 152.94 GiB used: 13.76 GiB (9.0%) fs: btrfs
    dev: /dev/nvme0n1p4
  ID-4: /var/log size: 152.94 GiB used: 13.76 GiB (9.0%) fs: btrfs
    dev: /dev/nvme0n1p4
Swap:
  ID-1: swap-1 type: partition size: 1.95 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) priority: -2
    dev: /dev/nvme0n1p6
Sensors:
  Src: /sys System Temperatures: cpu: 38.0 C mobo: N/A
  Fan Speeds (RPM): cpu: 2580 fan-2: 2580
Info:
  Processes: 212 Uptime: 9m wakeups: 2589 Memory: total: 8 GiB note: est.
  available: 7.42 GiB used: 2.91 GiB (39.2%) igpu: 64 MiB Init: systemd v: 253
  default: graphical Compilers: gcc: 13.1.1 Packages: pm: pacman pkgs: 1100
  Shell: Sudo (sudo) v: 1.9.14p3 default: Bash v: 5.1.16
  running-in: xfce4-terminal inxi: 3.3.28

Since you had ssh daemon setup now, I guess you mean you can’t login via ssh either?

Does you laptop have builtin diagnostics? Or you could download the lenovo diagnostics?

Have you tired booting USB Install image? Does it happen then? Does it happen for other images? Have you tried memtest86 maybe?

Doesn’t look like you have updated BIOS recently, so that didn’t change.

I was able to log in via SSH, but those two times I’ve booted successfully and start the daemon I haven’t encountered this issue. I was able to log in from Termux with no issue.

I’ll look into Lenovo diagnostics when I get home. I haven’t tried booting from a USB image yet, and I’m gonna be honest and say that I haven’t heard about memtest86 before :sweat_smile:

I’ll create a new post in this thread when I get home from work can give the solutions a shot!

I suggest that you use systemctl enable --now sshd so it is enabled in future automatically and started now. If the laptop is internet exposed I strongly suggest you setup ssh keys for access and disable password authentication so you can only authentication by ssh key. There are ongoing ssh attacks on internet accessible IP addresses. SSH keys are a good idea anyway, especially when coupled with the agent that is automatically started with most desktop environments, which caches your ssh keys and mediates access so you don’t have to type passwords all the time to unlock the ssh key.