Hello all.
My Dad just got a new ThinkPad P14s Gen 5 (AMD), and he’s installed Fedora on it, at my recommendation. He doesn’t know the first thing about tech, but so far he’s adjusted quite well from his MacBook. However, he does have one problem that I don’t know quite how to fix: in some applications (like Konsole, Settings, Discover, and a few others), when I try to type, the cursor doesn’t move/no text shows up, but as soon as I move the mouse, the text I typed shows up. Also, when the cursor freezes, so does the rest of the application. I use Gentoo, so I’m used to combing through log files and troubleshooting things, but my system is way more minimal than a base Fedora installation, and for the life of me I cannot figure out what’s wrong from neither dmesg nor journalctl. To be fair, there are a lot of things SEGFAULTing here, so I really can’t tell what’s going on. can someone else take a look, and tell me if there’s a fix, or if I need to file a bug report?
Log files: journalctl, dmesg.
Interesting - another 780m graphics card machine which isn’t redrawing the screen unless it’s forced to by mouse movement. That’s three (possibly four) reports that I’ve seen with the same or similar behaviour, and they’re all using a 780M.
No idea if that’s the root cause I’m afraid, and it may well be a total coincidence as I assume that’s a fairly common chipset to be in a laptop.
Almost all the segfaults seem to be from Zoom, and it’s ZoomWebViewHost helper, but I’m not a user, so I’ve no idea if it’s steaming software turd and this is normal behaviour for it.
Could you post the output from an inxi -Fzxx please.
Alright, here you go: inxi -Fzxxx
Also, if you look in the output about the windowing system, it says Xwayland in a place where I think it should really say Wayland. Not sure if that’s part of the problem or not, but I think it’s worth looking into, since I doubt the default configuration for Fedora was meant to be like that (I certainly didn’t make it that way).
So is he using the provided version of fedora/redhat, its a fully supported system for it. Lenovo is pretty boss for that, and looking at your graphics drivers I see the following in contrast to mine.
Display: wayland server: X.org v: 1.21.1.15 with: Xwayland v: 24.1.4
compositor: kwin_wayland driver: X: loaded: amdgpu
unloaded: modesetting,radeon alternate: fbdev,vesa dri: radeonsi
gpu: amdgpu display-ID: 0
Vesa is a bit dated, is he only using a console on this system and no loaded UI ?
fbdev - what is being utilized by this ?
Rest looks normal in terms of wayland etc.
And have you made the change to modesetting=0 or did it come default that way ?
AFAIK - that specific machine supports fedora out of box.
(PS) you can verify wayland is default server in kde by going to settings > about > should be listed on that fancy page!
All the weird drivers (VESA, fbdev) were there right from the install. modesetting=0 was also not my doing, again, default configuration. I looked at the kernel arguments in dmesg, only one set was root=PARTUUID=<PARTUUID of Dad's root disk>. AMDGPU seems to be set as modesetting driver, at least from what I saw in dmesg. Also, if you look at the part of the inxi output about the GPU, you’ll see that the driver in use is in fact AMDGPU, for both the GPU itself, and also for the display server.
Look, what I really want to do is fix this, and maybe file a bug report if it’s appropriate, but dmesg, journalctl, and inxi have not shown me any useful information so far. Is this just one of those obscure bugs where you have to report it as it is, with no other information, and hope that someone stumbles across the right line of code someday?
Yeah its weird. Definitely a bug, everyone’s who’s reported it have had the depreciated drivers like vesa. I remember using that back in like 2004 lol. same goes for fbdev. Just wondering if it got added in as a bum kernel option somehow.
Seems on par with gnome that fractional scaling is an issue ( most likely due to something using vesa or fbdev do not quote me on that - its a guestimation )
These two articles kind of outline what could be going on, Even as a native KDE user - if you install gnome and test this out does it alleviate any issues that he is currently experiencing ?
I’m not sure about that! Those linked replies are in context about effects of Gnomes fractional scaling on non-gnome apps, while OP’s problem was:
Yeah but for idealism its more for testing if its compositing that’s an issue or something else - I am reading on kde’s bug tracker that some applications are disabling compositing that’s causing a 12 fps feeling while interacting so. Its warranted to look up that as gnome forces that behavior but its free fall in kde.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=497991
That’s the reason for the suggestion for testing in gnome or another wm to verify its just WM and not something else
OK, I can try installing GNOME, but maybe I should try removing the fbdev and VESA drivers from my kernel? I don’t know where to start, as I use a custom kernel on my machine, with the desired default graphics driver built-in.
Some clearer guidance would be greatly appreciated…
Unfortunately, my Dad is getting so sick of this that he’s considering installing Windows 11. Can someone please provide some actual help?