Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 219578
Display locks up - Apparently no way to disable DPMS
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:11:51 EST
Description of problem: DPMS seems to be enabled by default, and there appears to be no option to disable it in the xorg.conf file. IIRC it used to be possible to set Option "DPMS" "off" ...or something very similar, in order to disable DPMS. This no longer works... setting DPMS to any value enables it, and it's already enabled by default. This essentially makes my laptop unusable, because when DPMS kicks in, the display shuts off, and can not be woken up by any means other than reboot. This latter problem is a bug in the nVidia drivers, but it should still be possible to work around such bugs by disabling DPMS. As far as I can tell, there's no way to do this. I've searched the net and all I could find are old instructions that no longer work, or people complaining about the same problem. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.1.1-47.2.fc6 How reproducible: always Steps to Reproduce: 1. wait for DPMS to kick in 2. 3. Actual results: watch display irrevocably power off Expected results: DPMS should be disable-able. Additional info: Running FC6 with proprietary nVidia drivers. 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV34M [GeForce FX Go5200 32M/64M] (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA]) Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Unknown device 0020 Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 248, IRQ 10 Memory at fd000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M] Memory at d0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M] Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 2 Capabilities: [44] AGP version 3.0
Thanks for the report. For users who are experiencing problems installing, configuring, or using the unsupported 3rd party proprietary "nvidia" video driver, Nvidia provides indirect customer support via an online web based support forum. Nvidia monitors these web forums for commonly reported problems and passes them on to Nvidia engineers for investigation. Once they've isolated a particular problem, it is often fixed in a future video driver update. The NVNews Nvidia Linux driver forum is located at: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=14 Once you have reported this issue in the Nvidia web forums, others who may have experienced the particular problem may be able to assist. If there is a real bug occuring, Nvidia will be able to determine this, and will likely resolve the issue in a future driver update for the operating system releases that they officially support. While Red Hat does not support the proprietary nvidia driver, users requiring technical support may also find the various X.Org, XFree86, and Red Hat mailing lists helpful in finding assistance: X.Org mailing lists: http://www.freedesktop.org/XOrg/XorgMailingLists XFree86 mailing lists: http://www.xfree86.org/sos/lists.html Red Hat mailing lists: https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo Setting status to "CANTFIX" (unsupported).
The bug I'm reporting is not a bug in the nvidia driver. It's a bug in the X server. The info about the nvidia driver is only background. The X server needs a way to disable DPMS.
xset -dpms off turns it off, right
Yes, in my particular case it does seem to, though there are reports across the internet that it does not work for people. But this isn't a fix; there are a couple of problems with that as a "solution" to the problem: - It's a user setting, and must be done manually (or in some start-up file) once the user is logged in and can connect to the X server. - This means that it won't prevent DPMS from shutting off the display, say, when gdm is waiting for the user to log in... at least not without also making modifications to the X start-up scripts, which I'd really rather avoid - It also means that some random, hard-to-identify userland desktop environment process can re-enable it without the user knowing There needs to be a way *IN THE X SERVER* to permanently disable the feature, so that no userland process can turn it back on. There always was such a feature before FC6 (at least, up to FC4 - I didn't run 5)... The link below suggests that this change may have happened in version 1.1.1-3.fc6: http://fedoranews.org/cms/node/2221 I don't think there's any problem with enabling DPMS by default, as long as there is a configuration option to disable it completely... At the moment, there doesn't seem to be. Here's an example of someone else having this problem... I had seen others as well, but having trouble finding more at the moment. http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=72051
Please report this issue to X.Org developers by filing a bug report in the X.Org bugzilla located at http://bugs.freedesktop.org in the "xorg" component. Once you've filed your bug report to X.Org, if you paste the new bug URL here, Red Hat will continue to track the issue in the centralized X.Org bug tracker, and will review any bug fixes that become available for consideration in future updates. Setting status to "NEEDINFO_REPORTER", awaiting X.Org bug URL for tracking.
I submitted the bug as requested: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9497 Thanks