GUI Fails to Start After Long Sleep and OS Crashes on Subsequent Reboot

Issues & Assistance
1

Hi Everyone,

I have a new custom built PC (Hardware specs listed below) and have chosen to install CachyOS with KDE on it and the operating system works really except for one slight issue. When I put the system to sleep and it is asleep for a significant amount of time (For example, this morning, I knocked the mouse and the PC woke up at 7am this morning, I waited about half an hour and sent it back to sleep whilst I was working and then woke it up proper at 6pm) then the graphics doesn’t wake up properly.

The PC wakes up, the fans spin up and the RGB starts, the keyboard and mouse light up and the monitor changes to blue indicating it is awake but I get a black screen, no mouse cursor. I went to press Ctrl+Alt+Delete which seemed to trigger a restart, the CachyOS logo suddenly appeared with the spinny gif and then the PC switched to a black screen and the monitor switches to no signal detect as if it was going to restart but then nothing happens.

Normally I can see the motherboard go into a restart as it displays a red and orange light when POST begins but they never appear and pressing the reset button does not do anything, it’s as if the machine goes brain dead. I have to press and hold the power button to force the machine off, count to 5 and then power it back on again, at which point POST is a little bit longer but then the PC boots up. No such issue occurs in Windows 11 on the same PC and I have fast startup turned off.

I thought it may be to do with hibernation in Linux but I added several files to systemd that I am lead to believe disables hibernation and should force the machine to just do sleep. The display manager is SDDM and when I am initiating a sleep, it is at the login screen. Short sleeps work fine, I was preparing food and the machine went to sleep and woke up just fine, that would be about an hour and 30 minutes long.

So from what I can gather, when the machine is asleep for long enough and woken up, the core OS wakes up fine, but the graphical components crash and then fail to restart perhaps??? and then the subsequent attempt to reboot hangs on the power transition?

OS Specs are as follows:

  • Linux 6.13.0-3-cachyos
  • KDE Plasma 6.2.5
  • KWin (Wayland)
  • systemd 257.2-2-arch

Hardware Specs are as follows:

  • ASRock X870 Pro RS WiFi
  • AMD Ryzen 9 7900X @ 5.73 GHz
  • 64 GB DDR5 RAM
  • AMD Radeon RX7900 XT (20 GB) [Discrete]
  • AMD Raphael [Integrated]
  • BIOS Version 3.18.AS01 [Beta] (Dated 22/01/2025)
  • Monitor is an Iiyama G-Master GB3461WQSU-B1 connected via DisplayPort

I seen the post by RodZe (Computer does not wake up from sleep) which sounds similar-ish but he is using an NVIDIA card, whereas mine is AMD.

Does anyone have any ideas on possible causes? Does anyone else use this motherboard and has encountered the same issue and fixed it?

If any more information is needed please ask but note I am still a beginner so please explain it like I’m five.

Thanks

2

I have a very similar pc (though slightly older variants (built last year)) and I have no issues with sleep and resumes. So you’re probably onto something with maybe a bios issue on the MB?

3

Hi Danny,

Can you list your hardware specs please? Just so I can compare, specifically if you are using a different BIOS to me, granted if you are, I have no idea if I can downgrade mine and then test.

Many thanks.

EDIT: In fact, I’m going to quickly reboot and make a list of the BIOS settings too.

4

Type: Desktop System: ASRock product: A620M Pro RS WiFi v: N/A
serial:
Mobo: ASRock model: A620M Pro RS WiFi serial:
UEFI: American Megatrends LLC. v: 3.15 date: 12/10/2024
CPU:
Info: 8-core model: AMD Ryzen 7 7700X bits: 64 type: MCP cache: L2: 8 MiB
Speed (MHz): avg: 5334 min/max: 545/5573 cores: 1: 5334 2: 5334 3: 5334
4: 5334 5: 5334 6: 5334 7: 5334 8: 5334
Graphics:
Device-1: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Navi 33 [Radeon RX 7600/7600
XT/7600M XT/7600S/7700S / PRO W7600] driver: amdgpu v: kernel
Device-2: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Raphael driver: amdgpu
v: kernel
I have an Asrock monitor (but that probably doesn’t matter) and only 32 GB memory.
Hmm, maybe i need to go see if there are BIOS updates…since I see you with more current than me…but of course I’m kinda scared if you have problems :wink:
Edit: I checked and I could update to your level, but given your issues, and the fact that BIOS is tagged Beta…I’ll wait a bit.

5

I have reset my BIOS to factory default, I’ll see how it goes over the next couple of days, it should in theory happen again tonight as I’ll put the machine to sleep before bed and then wake it up in about 9-10 hours time.

If it crashes again then I’ll look into trying to downgrade to the last version, I can’t remember what BIOS version came with the motherboard though. If it works, I’ll slowly start reintroducing changes to the BIOS until it triggers again.

If you have any ideas on things to check in the mean time, I’d still appreciate the help.

6

Not really, but if you want me to look at some settings, I’ll happily do so.
I have overclocking on automatic (just fyi) boost.

7

So I did have Gaming Mode: Disabled, Performance Boost: Cinebench_profile_1, the DRAM Profile was set to XMP1-5200 40-40-40-76 1.25V. I had SR-IOV enabled for some reason as well as some others.

Other than the DRAM Profile and Gaming Mode, I wasn’t sure what difference the others made. Gaming Mode turned off SMT so my CPU showed as 12 threads rather than 24 and the DRAM profile puts the RAM up to 5,200 MHz its advertised for rather than the stock 3,600 MHz that the BIOS seems to initialise it to.

So anything related to that, I’d appreciate some info about. I did find out about the Ctrl+Alt+F3 key combo as well which allowed me to jump into a console GUI so if it does happen, I might be able to use that to see if I can check on SDDM and such.

8

So resetting the BIOS didn’t make a difference, the GUI locked up again today but I think what is happeening is that SDDM is crashing instead. I woke up the PC yesterday and it was fine but then today, when I woke up the PC, I saw SDDM appear for about 10 seconds before going to a black screen.

With this in mind, I pressed Ctrl+Alt+F5 which dropped me to a console, I logged in and then issued a systemctl restart sddm.service command and the GUI restarted and I was able to log in again.

9

Well technically speaking you don’t even need SDDM, you can launch ‘startplasma-wayland’ directly from the terminal, so you could disable sddm and eliminate or confirm it is the cause.

1 Like
10

I suppose that is true, could potentially look into some of the text based display managers I’ve heard about as a replacement as well.

11

Hi Danny,

Just thought I should chime in that I think I’ve solved the issue, I had to swap from SDDM to GDM as my default display manager, it seems to survive waking from sleep. In addition, the lock up when restarting issue, I think I’ve resolved by moving the nowatchdog argument from the kernel command line and adding reboot=efi to it instead.

I was able to restore the original BIOS settings and never have a healthy 5.2 GHz RAM speed back again. :smiley:

SWTF