I’ve been having issues with arch on my framework 16, I was experiencing issues before with it SDDM booting to a black screen and freezing sometimes on the login screen, sometimes it would freeze at login at a black screen sometimes it would load the desktop wallpaper and cursor then freeze, but recently it has begun locking up a few moments after the desktop loads. Thinking this might be an nvidia issue I pulled the 5070 out and went back to the integrated graphics but this had no change. I decided to try booting bazzite again which hasn’t had any issues at all just to see if it would boot with the AMD iGPU and it loaded just fine. Thinking it was possibly something I miss configured or a broken package I decided to put a new drive in and do a fresh install of arch. I’m running KDE plasma on both installs and even a fresh install is experiencing this issue on every boot. It lets me login loads my desktop and a few seconds later freezes. I tried looking at the journalctl from my original install and nothing jumped out at me an error. I did update arch a couple of days ago and that’s when the lockups got worse. I’ve got that AI 9 HX370 and I seem to only have this issue with arch and wondering if anyone else was experiencing problems like this with arch. I even got desperate and installed Windows twice to see if windows would play nice.
I’m using Arch Linux with KDE Plasma on FL13 7040U(no dGPU), after updating the system yesterday, it always freezes second after login. I had to use root account to downgrade to February 1st
I had a similar experience.
I was running Kubuntu (25.10). Everything was basically fine, except things like auto-brightness not being there or something like that.
Then I tried KDE Neon, and it seemed to pull a BIOS/firmware update.
After that, Kubuntu also started freezing and crashing. I tried looking into it and throwing it at ChatGPT, but nothing really showed up — nothing crashed, it just froze. I dropped kubuntu as solution
In my case, I think the Ubuntu packages just got a bit moldy or something like that.
Looks like the current freezing after login might just be it failing to update the display. As the volume up and down buttons make it chime and the brightness up and down buttons cause the display brightness to change. Also it seems putting the notebook to sleep and resuming causes it to start working again. Weird.
I’m also experiencing issues after update. KDE Plasma 6.5.5-1 on Arch with kernel 6.18.5.arch1-1, Framework 16 AMD with dGPU.
I was able to switch to TTY 3 (ctrl-alt-F3) and look through the journalctl and noticed org_kde_powerdevil popping up quite frequently, so I unplugged the power cable and the desktop magically unfroze. I also ended up removing ~/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc in a previous step, so I’m not sure if this also had any impact.
I also notice a lot of errors relating to display update errors, related to the powerdevil process:
Feb 07 08:30:01 framework org_kde_powerdevil[8173]: EDID readable from /sys but not using I2C. Display change detection unreliable.
Feb 07 08:30:01 framework org_kde_powerdevil[8173]: [ 8173] EDID readable from /sys but not using I2C. Display change detection unreliable.
Feb 07 08:30:01 framework org_kde_powerdevil[8173]: [ 8173] Watching for display connection changes, resolved watch mode = Watch_Mode_Udev, poll loop interval = 500 millisec
Feb 07 08:30:01 framework org_kde_powerdevil[8173]: [ 8173] extra_stabilization_millisec: 0, stabilization_poll_millisec: 100
Feb 07 08:30:01 framework org_kde_powerdevil[8173]: [ 8173] libddcutil recheck thread 0x561193f3c900 started
Feb 07 08:30:01 framework org_kde_powerdevil[8173]: [ 8173] libddcutil watch thread 0x561193f4c060 started
Feb 07 08:30:01 framework org_kde_powerdevil[8173]: [ 8173] Display redetection finished.
Feb 07 08:30:01 framework org_kde_powerdevil[8173]: [ 8173] Unquiescing libddcutil API...
Feb 07 08:30:01 framework org_kde_powerdevil[8173]: [ 34806] (dw_recheck_displays_func) Recheck interval: Sleeping for 200 milliseconds
Feb 07 08:30:01 framework org_kde_powerdevil[8173]: [ 8173] Quiescing libddcutil API...
Feb 07 08:30:01 framework org_kde_powerdevil[8173]: [ 8173] Quiesce libddcutil API complete
Feb 07 08:30:01 framework org_kde_powerdevil[8173]: [ 8173] Display redetection starting.
Feb 07 08:30:01 framework org_kde_powerdevil[8173]: [ 34806] recheck thread terminating because watch thread terminated
Feb 07 08:30:01 framework org_kde_powerdevil[8173]: [ 8173] Watch thread terminated.
Feb 07 08:30:01 framework org_kde_powerdevil[8173]: EDID readable from /sys but not using I2C. Display change detection unreliable.
I’m not sure if my system is stable, but I was able to write this forum post from the laptop, so fingers-crossed!
UPDATE: After a reboot, the issue returned. I was able to find more info about the power_devil errors and tracked down a suggestion here: ddcutil 2.1.4-1: DDC communication failed · Issue #431 · rockowitz/ddcutil · GitHub.
Adding POWERDEVIL_NO_DDCUTIL=1 to my /etc/environment file seems to be working. After a reboot, it booted up without issue and had no freezing. Let’s see if this works?
Came across another post on the framework forums of someone complaining about the exact same thing as me, the only difference is putting the notebook to sleep and resuming doesn’t fix the issue for more than a couple of seconds and it freezes on SDDM before you can log in. Decided to try putting my dGPU back in for troubleshooting and I can confirm this to be the case. No idea what updated packaged bugged this, but it seems arch is unusable on the framework 16 with the dGPU on the current build. I guess I’ll have to pull my dGPU for a while until this is fixed.
Edit: looked at my journalctl and found the same errors from org_kde_powerdevil, so I also added the POWERDEVIL_NO_DDCUTIL=1 to my /etc/environment file and it seems to have fixed the problem for me as well.
Following solution from here helped me to solve it.
Interesting. I’ve found a solution from another angle.
This seem to be related to PSR/replays in my case (the same symptom, also triggered by KDE session). Adding amdgpu.dcdebugmask=0x410 to the kernel commandline fixes it. It disables Panel Self Refresh and Replays (disabling PSR only was not sufficient).
There’s already bug report on AMD bug tracking list.
For what it’s worth, I had the same problem, and fixed it simply by cleaning the cache as per KDE - ArchWiki
Perhaps the kernel parameter will also prove necessary for me, but for now the cleared cache seems to have solved it.
It’s definitely a problem specific to Plasma, by the way. I tried a few other compositors and they worked fine (hyprland, sway, etc)
Are you guys all on Wayland? I’m using xlibre and have not experienced any lockups.
Hello @turbo5546
This is a bug in the ddcutil 2.2.5.
If you downgrade to the previous version 2.2.3 should fix it until it’s fixed upstream.
I’m using EndeavourOS with KDE Plasma and was hit by this issue myself
Yeah arch already pushed out ddcutil 2.2.5-2 sometime yesterday with a fix and it works correctly now.