Intel PRIME profile causes freezing on boot

Question

After a new installation of Loki 0.4.1, the system boots fine but has some issues with freezing on booting and suspending. As per discussions, installing the proprietary nVidia drivers provided through the AppCenter fixes this issue.

However, once installed, the PRIME profile is by default on nvidia. Changing this to intel via sudo prime-select intel on the command line, or through the nvidia-settings gui, and then rebooting, causes the system to freeze.

This freeze occurs after the elementaryos logo on boot. Removing quiet slash from grub to see what's going on reveals a single failed status item:

[FAILED] Failed to start the NVIDIA Persistence Daemon.
See 'systemctl status nvidia-persistenced.service' for details.

This particular issue is fixed following suggestions here.

Once fixed, the boot sequence reveals no failed items, but there remains no change in the freezing behavior. The system is unresponsive to any commands and requires a hard reset.

Booting into recovery mode and switching back to nvidia via sudo prime-select nvidia at the command line allows the user to reboot back into gpu-mode, but at the cost of losing access to the intel power-saving mode (e.g. fans constantly running, etc.)

This is occurs on a Razer Blade v4 with GTX 970m and Intel i7–6700HQ.

Any solutions?

Answer 1

I've stumbled across a solution that seems to work. The problem seems to stem from the fact that if the discrete Nvidia GPU is switched off before starting Xorg, the system freezes.

The GitHub repo here provides a way to manually disable/enable the discrete card after starting the graphical session.

I followed a different set of instructions reiterated below:

$ sudo apt install git cpio iasl
$ git clone https://github.com/m4ng0squ4sh/razer_blade_14_2016_acpi_fix
$ cd razer_blade_14_2016_acpi_fix
$ sudo make all && sudo make install

Then, modify a boot-time config file

$ sudo vim  /etc/grub.d/10_linux

There is a block of code around line 200 that reads something like

EOF
    fi
    sed "s/^/$submenu_indentation/" << EOF
        initrd  ${intel_ucode} ${rel_dirname}/${initrd}

or

EOF
    fi
    sed "s/^/$submenu_indentation/" << EOF
        initrd  ${rel_dirname}/${initrd}

Edit the line last line to read

initrd  ${rel_dirname}/razer_acpi_fix.img ${rel_dirname}/${initrd}

or

initrd  ${rel_dirname}/razer_acpi_fix.img ${intel_ucode} ${rel_dirname}/${initrd}

depending on the original construction.

Saving the file, ensuring I'm on the intel profile with sudo prime-select intel, updating the grub with sudo update-grub, and finally rebooting seems to avoid the system locking up.