On irregular intervals, my monitor gives a static noise effect (like old TV’s did) with big black squares moving in random patrons. Sometimes it happens 10 times a day, sometimes I didn’t see it for a week. It comes back often when the view is not moving much, so it only occurs when I write a text document, and not when I watch movies. Another pattern that I see is that it only happens after a long period in sleep mode. When I restart my system, it works normally. It happens in Fedora 35 and 36, in Wayland and X11.
The only thing I can do to stop the problem when it occurs, is unplugging the power from my display every ~15 minutes or restarting my computer. If I unplug HDMI it does nothing, the static noise stays for a moment. I can’t even see the internal monitor settings menu when it happens.
My first thought was that this was an error in my monitor (model: LG 34WN700 QHD Ultrawide 75Hz), but then I experienced a similar problem on my Full HD AOC monitor. It didn’t give a static noise effect, but the monitor keeps blacking out for a few seconds. It only occurs in Fedora. When I connect my laptop to the display (MacBook Air 2014 with macOS) I can use it without problems.
Then I thought that it has to be my graphics card (NVIDIA GTX 1660 super), but then I tested if the error occurred in Windows 10 on the same machine with the same graphics card, and it works just fine. So I reinstalled my whole Fedora Linux system (on another SSD), and it worked without problems for more than a month, but now the problem is back, and my screen gives static noise again… every 10 minutes.
I hope someone can give me suggestions on what I can do to debug this issue. What could it be: is it my graphics card that doesn’t work properly (in Fedora)? Is it an error in Gnome or Fedora itself? Or is it my monitor?
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Welcome to ask 
- Are you using the nvidia drivers installed from rpmfusion or the default nouveau driver?
- Is your system fully updated?
sudo dnf upgrade --refresh
- What program(s) are you using when this happens?
- Are you using the default Wayland DM or are you using xorg/x11?
Most of those questions will be answered if you post the output of `inxi -Fzxx’ as preformatted text using copy&paste with the </> Preformatted text tags available on the tool bar above the input window.
Thanks for your fast reply!
- I’m using the rpm fusion NVIDIA drivers.
- System is fully updated
- It happens in many kinds of programs: Firefox, LibreOffice etc.
- The problem occurs in Wayland and in X11
Output inxi -Fzxx:
12System:
12Kernel 5.19.11-200.fc36.x86_64 12arch x86_64 12bits 64 12compiler gcc 12v 2.37-36.fc36 12Desktop GNOME
12v 42.5 12tk GTK 12v 3.24.34 12wm gnome-shell 12dm GDM 12Distro Fedora release 36 (Thirty Six)
12Machine:
12Type Desktop 12Mobo ASRock 12model B450M Pro4 12serial <superuser required>
12UEFI-[Legacy] American Megatrends 12v P1.60 12date 11/05/2018
12Battery:
12Device-1 hidpp_battery_0 12model Logitech Wireless Mouse MX Master 2S 12serial <filter> 12charge 55%
(should be ignored) 12status discharging
12CPU:
12Info 6-core 12model AMD Ryzen 5 2600X 12bits 64 12type MT MCP 12arch Zen+ 12level v3 12rev 2 12cache
12L1 576 KiB 12L2 3 MiB 12L3 16 MiB
12Speed (MHz) 12avg 2222 12high 2440 12min/max 2200/3600 12boost enabled 12cores 121 2440 122 2397 123 2200
124 2200 125 2200 126 2200 127 2058 128 2200 129 2174 1210 2200 1211 2200 1212 2200 12bogomips 86226
12Flags avx avx2 ht lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 sse4a ssse3 svm
12Graphics:
12Device-1 NVIDIA TU116 [GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER] 12vendor Gigabyte 12driver nvidia 12v 515.65.01
12arch Turing 12pcie 12speed 2.5 GT/s 12lanes 16 12ports 12active none 12off HDMI-A-1 12empty DP-1,DP-2,DP-3
12bus-ID 23:00.0 12chip-ID 10de:21c4
12Display wayland 12server X.org 12v 1.20.14 12with Xwayland 12v 22.1.3 12compositor gnome-shell 12driver
12gpu nvidia,nvidia-nvswitch 12display-ID 0
12Monitor-1 HDMI-A-1 12model AOC 27B1 12res 1920x1080 12dpi 82 12diag 686mm (27")
12OpenGL 12renderer NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER/PCIe/SSE2 12v 4.6.0 NVIDIA 515.65.01
12direct render Yes
12Audio:
12Device-1 NVIDIA TU116 High Definition Audio 12vendor Gigabyte 12driver snd_hda_intel 12v kernel 12pcie
12speed 8 GT/s 12lanes 16 12bus-ID 23:00.1 12chip-ID 10de:1aeb
12Device-2 AMD Family 17h HD Audio 12vendor ASRock 12driver snd_hda_intel 12v kernel 12pcie 12speed 8 GT/s
12lanes 16 12bus-ID 25:00.3 12chip-ID 1022:1457
12Sound Server-1 ALSA 12v k5.19.11-200.fc36.x86_64 12running yes
12Sound Server-2 PulseAudio 12v 15.0 12running no
12Sound Server-3 PipeWire 12v 0.3.58 12running yes
12Network:
12Device-1 Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet 12vendor ASRock 12driver r8169
12v kernel 12pcie 12speed 2.5 GT/s 12lanes 1 12port f000 12bus-ID 1f:00.0 12chip-ID 10ec:8168
12IF enp31s0 12state up 12speed 1000 Mbps 12duplex full 12mac <filter>
12Bluetooth:
12Device-1 ASUSTek Broadcom BCM20702A0 Bluetooth 12type USB 12driver btusb 12v 0.8 12bus-ID 1-3:2
12chip-ID 0b05:17cb
12Report rfkill 12ID hci0 12rfk-id 0 12state down 12bt-service enabled,running 12rfk-block 12hardware no
12software yes 12address see --recommends
12Drives:
12Local Storage 12total 920.39 GiB 12used 57.99 GiB (6.3%)
12ID-1 /dev/nvme0n1 12vendor Samsung 12model SSD 970 EVO 500GB 12size 465.76 GiB 12speed 31.6 Gb/s
12lanes 4 12serial <filter> 12temp 37.9 C
12ID-2 /dev/sda 12vendor Crucial 12model CT480BX500SSD1 12size 447.13 GiB 12speed 6.0 Gb/s
12serial <filter>
12ID-3 /dev/sdb 12type USB 12vendor Generic 12model Flash Disk 12size 7.5 GiB 12serial <filter>
12Partition:
12ID-1 / 12size 210 GiB 12used 57.94 GiB (27.6%) 12fs btrfs 12dev /dev/sda2
12ID-2 /boot/efi 12size 1022 MiB 12used 14 MiB (1.4%) 12fs vfat 12dev /dev/sda3
12Swap:
12ID-1 swap-1 12type partition 12size 12.5 GiB 12used 0 KiB (0.0%) 12priority -2 12dev /dev/sda5
12ID-2 swap-2 12type zram 12size 8 GiB 12used 0 KiB (0.0%) 12priority 100 12dev /dev/zram0
12Sensors:
12System Temperatures 12cpu 47.8 C 12mobo N/A
12Fan Speeds (RPM) N/A
12Info:
12Processes 741 12Uptime 1h 50m 12Memory 15.55 GiB 12used 4.29 GiB (27.6%) 12Init systemd 12v 250
12target graphical (5) 12default graphical 12Compilers 12gcc 12.2.1 12Packages 12pm rpm 12pkgs N/A
12note see --rpm 12pm flatpak 12pkgs 35 12Client Unknown Client: pk-command-not-found 12inxi 3.3.21
My next suggestion would be to first run dnf distro-sync --refresh to make absolutely certain everything is fully up to date.
Then I would, unless you are in the habit of putting the system into hibernation, suggest that you consider disabling the physical swap to /dev/sda5. The inxi output shows 16GB RAM and very little swap usage. With 8GB swap in zram it is unlikely that the extra swap is needed, and it seems possible that having physical swap may interfere with the much faster swap with zram.
Swap has been discussed several times and the general consensus seems to have been that unless absolutely necessary using both physical and virtual swap is not best for performance. If you are not getting processes killed by the oomd then the extra swap is likely not needed.
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I have followed your advice and disabled my swap. So far I didn’t get any errors, so I hope that this was it! Thanks for your help!
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Bad news, disabling swap was not the answer. I got the strange problem again. Are there any other things a can try?