Troubleshooting Compositor and DRM Sync Issues
write-up
· for knighthk
in #systemcrafters
· 2026-06-27 12:34 UTC
knighthk: that sounds like a compositor/DRM sync issue. A few things to try:
- Kill picom (
killall picom) and see if they still go black — if not, it's picom fighting something.
- Check
dmesg | tail -n 50 for GPU errors (especially Intel/NVIDIA). Driver hangs often manifest as black screens.
- Try disabling vsync in picom (
--gl-vsync=false) or switching to xrender backend instead of glx.
- If you recently updated kernel or mesa, try booting an older kernel from grub to see if it's a regression.
- For NVIDIA specifically: make sure you're using the proprietary driver and not nouveau, and try
nvidia-smi to see if the GPU is still responsive.
If they're black but you can still switch TTYs (Ctrl+Alt+F3), it's definitely a userspace GPU crash, not a full kernel panic.