Linux Mint Black Screen on boot, Intel 100 Series Meteor Lake 155H

I hope that this post can save someone else the hours, days, weeks that I spent troubleshooting this stupid issue which I haven’t seemed to see anyone posting about much.

I had this issue, currently on Mint 22.3, started this troubleshooting saga on Mint 22.2 and got a temporary fix from overwriting with 22.1 and upgrading so I kept the old kernel, but I wanted a more robust solution. I’d get the mint logo, then it’d go black and wouldn’t come back up. Screen on, but black, and I’d have to hold the power button at which point there’d be a bunch of unhelpful terminal messages for a split second before shutting off.

All I had to do to fix it was remove “splash” from the grub Linux arguments. To do this, use sudo nano /etc/default/grub or vi or whatever text editor you prefer, go to the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=, likely has quiet splash following that, just delete splash, save and exit the file, then enter sudo update-grub in the terminal.

All I had to do to figure this out was waste hours of my life over weeks troubleshooting everything unrelated. Seems to be something related to the Xe driver compared to i915 (older intel graphics driver), so forcing it to use i915 made it work, but I wanted to use Xe for improved performance and fixing some compatibility, so my grub cmdline looks like GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“quiet modprobe.blacklist=i915 xe.force_probe=7d55”, this lets you boot using Xe and not use i915, alongside removing splash. Tried with kernels 6.8.0-94, 6.11.0-29, 6.14.0-37, and 6.18.7-061807 (unsupported by mint, but used mainline to install it anyways in hopes it’d fix it. it didn’t.), and it remained consistent between them, this solution working consistently, other than 6.8 which I believe doesn’t support Xe drivers, and very clearly had broken graphics (but DID actually boot without a black screen).

Edit: Forgot to mention the most important part, in order to bypass the black screen to get on so you can make this permanent fix, press e while Mint is selected on Grub in order to change the boot arguments, and like above, delete splash from GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=.

Hi, thank you for this tip!
I am considering buying a Framework 13 with exactly the same CPU (Intel Core Ultra 7 155H).
However, I need some quite specific hardware information I cannot find on the web, despite all of my efforts. This is related to a niche Intel CPU feature called Intel Processor Trace (or Intel PT). More precisely, I need to know whether one extension of this feature is supported, that is, whether it is possible to disable so-called “TNT” packets as part of traces generated using Intel PT.

Would you please agree to paste here the result of the following command?
$ grep -H . /sys/bus/event_source/devices/intel_pt/caps/*
That would be very, very helpful.

As you can see here [1], this is a harmless command that basically lists enabled capabilities related to the Intel PT feature on the considered hardware. Crucially, this does not include any serial number or whatever information that would be too specific.

Sorry to chime in with this weirdly specific question, I hope this is OK.

[1] perf tools support for Intel® Processor Trace - perf: Linux profiling with performance counters

Certainly! Also glad to help with any other questions you have.

/sys/bus/event_source/devices/intel_pt/caps/cr3_filtering:1
/sys/bus/event_source/devices/intel_pt/caps/cycle_thresholds:3f
/sys/bus/event_source/devices/intel_pt/caps/event_trace:0
/sys/bus/event_source/devices/intel_pt/caps/ip_filtering:1
/sys/bus/event_source/devices/intel_pt/caps/max_subleaf:1
/sys/bus/event_source/devices/intel_pt/caps/mtc:1
/sys/bus/event_source/devices/intel_pt/caps/mtc_periods:249
/sys/bus/event_source/devices/intel_pt/caps/num_address_ranges:2
/sys/bus/event_source/devices/intel_pt/caps/output_subsys:0
/sys/bus/event_source/devices/intel_pt/caps/payloads_lip:0
/sys/bus/event_source/devices/intel_pt/caps/power_event_trace:0
/sys/bus/event_source/devices/intel_pt/caps/psb_cyc:1
/sys/bus/event_source/devices/intel_pt/caps/psb_periods:3f
/sys/bus/event_source/devices/intel_pt/caps/ptwrite:1
/sys/bus/event_source/devices/intel_pt/caps/single_range_output:1
/sys/bus/event_source/devices/intel_pt/caps/tnt_disable:0
/sys/bus/event_source/devices/intel_pt/caps/topa_multiple_entries:1
/sys/bus/event_source/devices/intel_pt/caps/topa_output:1

Thank you very much! Unfortunately, the desired feature seems to be unsupported by this version of the Framework Laptop 13. Could you please confirm that you are using the latest BIOS version? And would you also please agree to paste here the result of the following command?
cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep microcode
This should yield several lines starting with “microcode” followed by the microcode version in hexadecimal.