Micro freezes with black screen in GNOME on Wayland when using multiple GPUs
I'm facing an annoying issue with Wayland when multiple GPUs are attached to my system (in my case, an RX 580 and a 5700 XT).
It's not consistently reproducible, as it happens somewhat randomly, but I've seen the behavior when opening a few apps (Firefox and VLC have triggered it), when I open Display Settings or when I'm opening nothing at all, just reading a website or watching a video on YouTube.
The screen goes black and unresponsive for about a second (audio continues to play if it was playing before) and then returns.
It does not happen on X.Org, it does not happen on other OSs (I triple boot macOS and Windows 10 in this machine) and it does not happen when I disconnect one of my GPUs. It only happens on Wayland and when both GPUs are connected.
To rule out other possibilities (such as extensions), I installed a fresh copy of my daily driver distro (Arch) without any 'extra' GNOME packages (just followed the guide, installed gnome-shell
, gdm
and their dependencies and booted), and issue persisted. Also tried booting from a Fedora 33 live USB.
The issue continued to happen in both cases - again only on Wayland, and again only when both GPUs were connected.
I'm attaching:
- the output for
lshw
for a quick snapshot of my system; and - the output for
sudo journalctl -f
when opening a video in VLC on XOrg and when I open the same video on Wayland (again, it's not just VLC, and sometimes it won't happen with VLC either, but I found it often happens with it)
I spoke to a GNOME developer and he found these particular lines suspicious:
nov 19 09:40:31 dmaciel-arch gnome-shell[14527]: clutter_actor_add_child: assertion 'child->priv->parent == NULL' failed
nov 19 09:40:31 dmaciel-arch gnome-shell[14527]: clutter_actor_add_child: assertion 'child->priv->parent == NULL' failed
nov 19 09:40:31 dmaciel-arch gnome-shell[14527]: clutter_actor_add_child: assertion 'child->priv->parent == NULL' failed
It's the only three lines I have found to consistently appear when the error happens.
Apologies in advance if this is not the right place to post this, but since the error mentions clutter I thought this might be the best place to start.
Let me know if there's anything I should try to troubleshoot this.
Best,
Daniel