Internal display flashes black after boot and display setting changes

Ask Fedora
1

Hi, I’m having an issue on Fedora KDE where my laptop’s built-in screen repeatedly flashes black after boot (after the login screen) and whenever I change display settings.

The screen goes black for ~1 second, comes back for another ~1 sec, then goes black again a few times before stabilizing. It also happens when I change the refresh rate in the settings and color depth, other monitor settings don’t seem to activate the cycling.

My setup:
Fedora KDE Plasma, Wayland
MSI Stealth 17 Studio A13V
Intel i9-13900H
NVIDIA RTX 4080 Laptop GPU + Intel Iris Xe hybrid graphics
Built-in display: 3840x2160 at around 144 Hz

What should I check to find out why the internal display keeps cycling black after boot or display mode changes?

2

You’ll probably find messages in journalctl output for drivers/graphics stacks/something to do with your Nv or Xe hardware being reset.

3

The system normally configures the internal gpu for the best and most efficient settings for that monitor. If the user changes that from the default it would seem that instead of blindly using the non-standard settings the system will check all the supported settings for that monitor before allowing the custom settings to be implemented.

Note that if your settings are not supported it may harm the display.

4

I found a workaround.

If I switch the laptop to Discrete Graphics Mode, the black flashing stops completely. So for some reason it only happens in Hybrid/MSHybrid mode. I can only switch this in windows with MSI center, I’m dual-booting and haven’t found a way to change this in fedora. The option exists in my BIOS, but it is grayed out/read-only.

I’m not sure what exactly breaks in hybrid mode, but it looks related to the Intel iGPU/internal display path rather than the NVIDIA driver. I tested with the proprietary NVIDIA driver fully removed, and the issue still happened.

I also checked journalctl after the flashing as suggested, but I didn’t see any clear errors, GPU resets, or obvious messages pointing to the cause.

I would still like to figure out how to fix this on hybrid mode for better battery efficiency for travel so I’m still open to suggestions.

5

The fix may require a vendor firmware update. Issues like this often affect multiple distros, so it is worth searching outside Fedora. Sometimes there are user comments for problems with specific hardware on https://linux-hardware.org/.