Arch Linux kernel and NVidia recent bugs
I was facing frequent freeze of the laptop recently. The discussion can be found here.
Basically, there are two issues, one is the Linux kernel, and the other is the NVidia driver update.
Linux kernel causes some Oops in the kernel, probably related, I don’t know. The result is that I can’t shutdown my laptop because it cannot unmount /home and /tmp. To resolve this, I upgraded the Linux kernel to 6.7.8, and added zswap.enabled=0 and numa=off as the kernel parameter, in GRUB. I am not sure which one is the actual action that solve the issue.
Another issue that drives me crazy is the NVidia. Since NVidia 545, the laptop will freeze suddenly. After several trials, I change to nvidia-open-dkms. Besides that, I also experienced switching the TTY causing the black screen but the mouse is visible and movable. This is slightly different from the discussion on the forum, in which the other users reported having a black screen with a visible mouse after resuming from suspend to memory (sleep). After much trial and error, I found that the compositor picom caused the issue. If I kill picom, then there is no issue when switching TTY, or even resuming from suspend to memory.
The forum suggested to use NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations=1 for the black screen issue. I tried, but it doesn’t work. Probably I did it wrongly.