External monitor flickering after screen turns on after inactivity

Submitted by Jethro Beekman

Assigned to Intel GFX Bugs mailing list

Link to original bug (#107103)

Description

When I "wiggle the mouse" after all screens have gone off from inactivity, my external monitor sometimes starts flickering. It will show my desktop for about a second, then go black, and after a couple of seconds it will come back, and this repeats indefinitely until I restart X. Resetting the monitor (by removing and re-inserting the power cable) doesn't help. Turn off the monitor using xrandr and bringing it back on doesn't help. While the flickering is happening, the monitor shows up as connected in xrandr with the correct resolution. My laptop screen and my other external monitor are not affected. This only started happening after a recent software update.

I suspect this is a software issue as everything was working fine until I upgraded the following packages:

mesa (17.3.6-1 -> 18.1.3-1)
linux (4.15.10-1 -> 4.17.3-1)
xorg-server (1.19.6+13+gd0d1a694f-1 -> 1.20.0-9)
xf86-video-intel (1:2.99.917+812+g75795523-1 -> 1:2.99.917+831+ge7bfc906-1)

There is nothing being logged in Xorg.0.log or dmesg. Please let me know if there are any debugging steps I can perform the next time this is happening.

Hardware: Dell Latitude E7470
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6650U CPU @ 2.20GHz
GPU: Intel Corporation Iris Graphics 540

Laptop monitor connected on eDP1
Acer monitor connectied on DP1-1 (DVI via docking station)
Samsung TV connected on HDMI1

Distro: Arch Linux

~ $uname -a
Linux jethro 4.17.3-1-ARCH #1 (moved) SMP PREEMPT Tue Jun 26 04:42:36 UTC 2018 x86_64 GNU/Linux

~ $sudo cat /sys/class/drm/card0/error
No error state collected