Occasional display blanking on new motherboard, I would like to rule out software

Framework Laptop 13 Linux
1

I recently did a motherboard swap to the new Core Ultra Series 3 motherboard and, while I’m generally happy with it, I am noticing an intermittent issue where the display goes black for up to a second, then back to normal.

I originally suspected it was something to do with flexing the board, but I’m not able to trigger display blanking by holding the laptop in a strange way or anything. I also suspected the eDP cable wasn’t making contact, but I tried reseating it with no luck.

dmesg is reporting PCIe errors, but they’re from my storage drive and uncorrelated with the display going blank.

The display will collapse for like a frame before blanking, so I suspect it’s some sort of video timing issue between the new Intel chip’s display output, whatever video mode GNOME’s compositor picks in KMS, and the panel currently in my laptop (which, to be clear, is from a 12th Gen Core Framework from 4 years ago). But I have no idea how to prove any of that. How would I go about checking that?

Which Linux distro are you using? Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS

Which kernel are you using? 7.0.0-28-generic (it’s the “hardware enablement” kernel, the default kernel on 24.04 is too old to use the onboard audio or graphics acceleration)

Which BIOS version are you using? 03.02 (according to dmidecode)

Which Framework Laptop 13 model are you using? Core Ultra Series 3 X7 358H

2

I was also seeing this on archlinux and turning off Panel Self Refresh by adding:

i915.enable_psr=0 xe.enable_psr=0

to the kernel cmdline fixed it for me.

I don’t acutaly think the i915 parameter is needed since the gpu uses the xe driver but it dose no harm.

3

I just applied that to the laptop and rebooted. No display flicker so far, but that’s a 10 minute sample size :wink:

I’ll post a follow-up in a day or two I guess? Or if I don’t show up again assume it worked?

4

+1

xe.enable_psr=0 has worked for me after a few hours of testing. When I’m feeling less lazy, I might try tweaking the psr settings more granularly in an attempt to eke out some more battery life.