X freezes randomly, screen turning black or flickering

Question

Hey everyone,
I'm having this annoying issue where X freezes randomly, I can't tell exactly when it happens. But when it happens, the following occurs:
- Screen is frozen, sometimes turns black, sometimes turns black and reappears, but still frozen.
- Cursor and sound (e.g. music) still works
- When switching to a new tty (CTRL-ALT-F6), I can log in and restart gdm using
sudo systemctl restart gdm
- When I'm in the other tty and trying to switch back to the graphical view, I get stuck completely, not even switching consoles works now.Reset is the only option from there
- Blindly restarting gnome-shell doesn't work
I somehow have the feeling, it happens more often when I physically move my laptop, but thats just a gut feeling. It also happens often when my screen is locked and I try to log back in.
I found this bug report, but its quite old and that doesn't help me: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/14594
Any help would be very appreciated, its really annoying to lose my work so often.
My specs:
$ lspci | grep VGA
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Chelsea XT GL [FirePro M4000]
Gallium 0.4 on AMD CAPE VERDE
Last edited by freijon (2014-04-12 10:33:22)

Answer 1

I can't tell whether they're relevant, but there are some errors:
journalctl -n 100 wrote:$ journalctl -n 100 | grep ERROR
Apr 14 22:51:11 arch kernel: [drm:si_dpm_set_power_state] *ERROR* si_set_sw_state failed
Apr 14 22:51:22 arch kernel: [drm:r600_ib_test] *ERROR* radeon: fence wait failed (-35).
Apr 14 22:51:22 arch kernel: [drm:radeon_ib_ring_tests] *ERROR* radeon: failed testing IB on GFX ring (-35).
Apr 14 22:51:24 arch kernel: [drm:si_dpm_set_power_state] *ERROR* si_set_sw_state failed
Apr 14 22:51:25 arch kernel: [drm:r600_ib_test] *ERROR* radeon: fence wait failed (-35).
Apr 14 22:51:25 arch kernel: [drm:radeon_ib_ring_tests] *ERROR* radeon: failed testing IB on GFX ring (-35).
Apr 14 22:51:25 arch kernel: [drm:radeon_pm_resume_dpm] *ERROR* radeon: dpm resume failed
I uploaded the full logs here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/0x3xed11zr13x … ogs.tar.gz in case anyone would like to check it out.