Sudden Blackscreen - How to debug?

General system Newbie
1

Hello Everyone!

Today while I was working, suddenly the screen went black and audio stopped playing (was listening to music).

At first it seemed like a power outage but then I saw my PC was still running. The only thing that I could do is shutdown the PC via the button on the case and then turn it back on.

Everything seems fine now and everything was also fine before.

I’m always curious about stuff like this and I was wondering if there are some logs that I could look at that could tell me what happened? I guess this was some sort of hard crash and I would like to know what the cause was.

2

You could look at jounalctl --since 00:00 where 00:00 is just before the screen went blank.

3

Thanks, everything looks quite normal before the sudden crash:

Nov 12 13:17:47 shamshiel-x670eaorusxtreme rtkit-daemon[1688]: Supervising 13 threads of 8 processes of 1 users.
Nov 12 13:17:47 shamshiel-x670eaorusxtreme rtkit-daemon[1688]: Supervising 13 threads of 8 processes of 1 users.
Nov 12 13:17:52 shamshiel-x670eaorusxtreme 1password[4182]: INFO 2024-11-12T12:17:52.038+00:00 ThreadId(107) [1P:op-auto-lock/src/linux.rs:467] X screensaver event detected
Nov 12 13:18:22 shamshiel-x670eaorusxtreme 1password[4182]: INFO 2024-11-12T12:18:22.042+00:00 ThreadId(107) [1P:op-auto-lock/src/linux.rs:467] X screensaver event detected
Nov 12 13:18:27 shamshiel-x670eaorusxtreme rtkit-daemon[1688]: Supervising 13 threads of 8 processes of 1 users.
Nov 12 13:18:27 shamshiel-x670eaorusxtreme rtkit-daemon[1688]: Supervising 13 threads of 8 processes of 1 users.
– Boot 231cad570c07489fa1f1e263a62a5c0a –
Nov 12 13:19:31 shamshiel-x670eaorusxtreme kernel: Linux version 6.11.5-arch1-1 (linux@archlinux) (gcc (GCC) 14.2.1 20240910, GNU ld (GNU Binutils) 2.43.0) #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Tue, 22 Oct 2024 18:31:38 +0000
Nov 12 13:19:31 shamshiel-x670eaorusxtreme kernel: Command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-linux root=UUID=f5b20031-15cb-4535-abfd-5ac282ec76f2 rw loglevel=3 nowatchdog nvme_load=YES nvidia-drm.modeset=1

There is just the sudden “Boot” log entry after my system went black.

4

Yeah, I can’t see anything there either.

A few things to try to narrow down the cause:

If you are running under X, try Wayland and see if it happens, also visa versa. If it doesn’t, it could be a bug in one or the other.

Try a new default user and see if happens to them. If it doesn’t, it could be a problem with your config / setup. Try replicating your setup one thing at a time and see if it happens again.

5

Tip: to help with such problems, I’d recommend reading about REISUB.

1 Like
6

Thanks, that seems very useful should that happen again. I will enable that!

1 Like
7

One off crashes will happen, an electron jumped the wrong direction and bang! It is only a problem if it is a regular occurrence.