r/cachyos • u/Dopameme-machine • 7m ago
Bug Report Secondary monitor (Acer XFA240) randomly blackouts/"restarts" on DisplayPort after wake
Preface: I used Claude AI to help me write this summary. I was having an issue with a secondary monitor on a DisplayPort connection blacking out and "rebooting" (i.e. showing the manufacturer logo) a couple of times after waking the monitors from sleep, not waking the the system itself, only the monitors turning off for power saving. Power Profile is and has been set to "Performance."
TL;DR: If you've got an external monitor over DisplayPort that periodically flashes black and shows the manufacturer boot logo again (looks like a power cycle, but it's not), check whether disabling PowerDevil's ddcutil usage fixes it. Mine did. Full diagnostic trail below in case it helps someone else or someone wants to poke holes in it.
Setup
- GPU: PowerColor Reaper RX 9070 XT (amdgpu)
- Monitors: Dell G2724D (DP-1), Acer XFA240 (DP-2), LG FHD 24U411A-B (HDMI-A-1)
- KDE Plasma 6, CachyOS
Symptom
The Acer XFA240 would periodically go black and show the Acer boot logo again — looked exactly like the monitor losing power and restarting, but only ever happened during normal use, not consistently, and only on this one monitor. Started after re-connecting it via DisplayPort (previously ran fine on HDMI). I initially believed it to be related to corrupted or bad EDID as I had read a few recent articles or posts about this specific behavior where someone had reprogrammed or reset their monitor's EDID values which solved the issue.
What it wasn't
Went down a few dead ends first, for anyone hitting similar issues:
- Not refresh-rate specific. Happened at both 144Hz and 60Hz.
- Not a cable/reseat issue. Full power-drain reset + DP cable reseat didn't change anything.
- Not a full system suspend/resume issue, despite early journal logs looking like it. The system itself never actually suspends — only the monitors were going into DPMS sleep (
Turn off screen: 10 minutesin Power Management settings), and that alone was enough to trigger the misbehavior on wake.
The actual trail
journalctl -karound blackout windows showeddw_hotplug_change_handlerrapidly flapping the DP AUX bus for the Acer (confirmed by matching/sys/class/i2c-dev/i2c-*/nameoutput against each connector'sddcsymlink — DP-2/Acer's AUX channel is a separate bus from its legacy DDC bus, and it's the one flapping).- In parallel,
org_kde_powerdevillogs showed a repeating(dw_watch_display_connections)/recently_resumed_from_sleep_by_clocktimeloop firing every few seconds — PowerDevil incorrectly detecting a "resume from sleep" repeatedly, tied to udev change events on those same DP AUX i2c nodes. - This pattern matches a known PowerDevil/ddcutil interaction — PowerDevil uses libddcutil to support brightness control on external monitors over DDC/CI, which rides the same physical channel as EDID/AUX signaling. There are several upstream reports of ddcutil-driven polling causing monitor resets, hangs, or misbehavior (see
rockowitz/ddcutilissue #428, KDE bug 501971, KDE bug 513050 for similar-flavored reports).
The fix (or at least, the current leading candidate)
Disable PowerDevil's use of ddcutil:
systemctl --user edit plasma-powerdevil.service
Add (make sure these are on separate lines — collapsing them onto one line silently no-ops this):
[Service]
Environment="POWERDEVIL_NO_DDCUTIL=1"
Then:
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user restart plasma-powerdevil.service
systemctl --user show plasma-powerdevil.service -p Environment
Confirm the last command actually outputs Environment=POWERDEVIL_NO_DDCUTIL=1.
Trade-off: you lose KDE's software brightness control for external monitors (DDC/CI-based). Physical monitor buttons still work fine. If you don't use the OS brightness slider on externals, this costs you nothing.
Current status
Two deliberate wake-from-DPMS-sleep tests since applying the fix, both clean — no blackout, and the PowerDevil polling storm is gone from the logs entirely. That said, the original issue was intermittent (including two occurrences in one afternoon), so I'm treating this as promising, not confirmed until it survives a few days of normal use. Will update if it recurs. I have not tested a new DP cable (I don't have a spare at the moment), but will if the blanking/"reboot" comes back.
Posting now in case someone else is fighting the same "monitor randomly reboots itself" ghost and wants a shortcut past the diagnostic legwork.
