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<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>Hello Arch community, a little anecdote of how I wasted better half of a day. Mods, feel free to remove it if too off-topic.</p> <p>I have Acer Nitro laptop with AMD/AMD combo, of course Arch installed, and despite smaller issues, everything runs quite good. On previous day evening my kid told me his favorite bike sim stopped to launch. Will fix soon, thought I, since it is proton, and our setup has some quirks (we share same steam dir but have different accounts to save space, and sometimes steam tools don't like that (I discovered that I can install steam tools to different directories only recently and it helped).</p> <p>But this time bug was worse: game launched normally, but after showing title screen, the machine immediately shut down. Boot up - chosen older version of Proton - same. Won't fix today, told I, since I was busy.</p> <p>Later during the evening I decided to play another game, on my account. Same issue: title screen, power off. There must be something with graphics driver, thought I. Pacman -Su, no luck - same issue.</p> <p>Ok, this must be something with zen kernel I installed recently. Switched to mainline kernel. No luck. Today I decided to fix the system. Upgraded all AUR packages related to radeon. Same problem. Tried to choose proprietary AMD driver instead of opensource. Same problem.</p> <p>Looked into journal of last boot, saw stack traces there, googled for some time, didn't find everything.</p> <p>Tried other steam game with Proton - same issue, but there was no such error message.</p> <p>Ok, is this issue of Proton or not?</p> <p>Installed supertuxkart. Launched it with discrete GPU. Works great. But when I maximized the window, machine turned off. (Remember, every time I have to boot up, type drive & login passwords, sudo to look into the logs, etc etc).</p> <p>So, there must be something with discrete graphics card.</p> <p>Since I had small script that changes power profile, I launched it and it turned out that machine doesn't turn off when external GPU is in powersave mode.</p> <p>But framerate was quite low, even in supertuxkart.</p> <p>It must be something with updates that I done this week, I thought, and tried to downgrade the system by installing all packages from cache that are older than week ago (a bit more complex, I had to write small script).</p> <p>Ended up with an unbootable system, because mkinitcpio after franken-downgrade didn't work properly, and boot didn't continue after entering HDD passphrase.</p> <p>After some tinkering with grub command lines, I decided to boot from archiso, chroot and put all packages back.</p> <p>Done. Meanwhile, I noticed another problem: battery didn't charge (stuck at 96%) and, more of that, when unplugged, machine immediately turned off, like there's no battery at all.</p> <p>Must be something with microcode, firmware or whatever. Removed amd-ucode and linux-firmware. No wifi, supertuxkart still shuts down machine when maximized.</p> <p>WTF.</p> <p>But... what if problems are related?</p> <p>Looked up regarding "battery stopped charge, shuts down when unplugged on Acer Nitro" (first time my search didn't mention linux, arch or amdgpu).</p> <p>First result in DDG mentioned some small hole in the back (never noticed it) used to reset the battery.</p> <p>30 seconds and voila! Battery works.</p> <p>And supertuxkart works with smooth-as-butter framerate, in all its glory.</p> <p>Same with proton games in Steam.</p> <p>So... it turned out that battery hung up, I had to reset it, and, since GPU, when needed more power, utilized battery even when on AC, shut my machine down.</p> <p>TL;DR: I wasted so much time on it, because I soooo got used to issues related to incomplete hardware support and problems that may occur because of Arch updates, that I completely ignored idea that it might be hardware problem. It was literally the last thing I looked.</p> <p>Arch way, while teaching us to understand inner workings of the system, troubleshoot issues and search for answers, also teaches another thing: adding "Arch" to search queries. Next time maybe I should trust Arch more, and start with generic problem description.</p> </div><!-- SC_ON -->   submitted by   <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/StrongStuffMondays"> /u/StrongStuffMondays </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/qy9kac/i_wasted_half_a_day_on_fixing_machine_poweroffs/">[link]</a></span>   <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/qy9kac/i_wasted_half_a_day_on_fixing_machine_poweroffs/">[comments]</a></span> |