Laptop Issues (Part 2)

The “system freezes with blinking lights” issue that I wrote about in the Laptop Issues blog entry a few months ago has unfortunately continued. I have not had a freeze while away from the computer since I started to disable my external display (using xrandr) during those times. I occasionally get freezes while using the system, however. I have been unable to find any definitive information about this specific issue online, so I am documenting what I know here.

One exemplary freeze happened a few weeks ago while I was working on taxes using two computers. I had reference and data open on my laptop while I was entering data into a different computer. The laptop is configured to lock the screen as well as blank it (using DPMS) after ten minutes of no activity. Though I was reading information from the laptop screen, I did not use the mouse or keyboard for ten minutes, and the system froze when the screen blanked. When it freezes, the caps lock LED blinks, which generally indicates a kernel panic. Unfortunately, there are no entries in the kernel log.

A different type of freeze happened this morning. The system froze when I pressed the keys that run the script that enables my external display (using xrandr). The screen went black, and the caps lock LED blinked. I confirmed that there are no relevant logs. This was the first time that the system froze when using xrandr. One annoying effect of system freezes is filesystem issues. I updated my script to call sync before running any xrandr commands, to minimize such issues if/when such a freeze occurs again.

When I searched for information after this issue first happened, I found some information indicating that it might be caused by the driver for the AMD graphics controller in my laptop. I have since searched for that information multiple times and have unfortunately not been able to find it. In case anybody else is researching the issue and comes across this blog entry, I am using a ThinkPad P14s AMD Gen 2 with the following graphics controller (information retrieved using lspci):

VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Cezanne
[Radeon Vega Series / Radeon Vega Mobile Series] (rev d1)

If I had this issue on a desktop computer, I would try disabling DPMS screen blanking and get into the habit of turning off my monitor(s) using the power switch. I am unable to turn off my laptop display like that, however, and I do not want to keep the display backlight on all the time.

This issue has caused a fair amount of stress, as I worry about my system suddenly freezing throughout every day. Perhaps it is unfair to AMD because such a bug could happen with Intel hardware, but I currently associate this issue with AMD and will be very weary of purchasing AMD hardware in the future. I only purchased AMD this time because the Intel models had a three month wait time before shipping.