Problems between XServer and Displaylink Docking Station

[Theresa]

Hi Adam,

thanks for responding so quickly.

Yes, I switch to a TTY and reboot intentionally because not only the
laptop is slow, I can hear the fans going off and nothing happens. It
just says black. Therefore I reboot it, because when nothing happens
after 5 minutes, there's no point in continuing any longer with having
it connected to the docking station.

I have attached the Xorg.logs ....they're not too huge, and to be honest
I didn't know what I was looking for specifically, so I attached them
all. I hope that's OK.

The modesetting driver was actually recommended by DisplayLink, so I
went for it and it worked fine for the past 3 years since I have this
laptop and the dockingstation.

I appreciate your help.
Thanks and cheers,
theresa

On 20.06.20 02:57, Adam Nielsen wrote:
>> Once I login, the screen goes black for a minute or two, until all of
>> the sudden my wallet-manager pops up. Other than that nothing else in my
>> desktop environment seems to start, and it also seems to be quite slow.
>> The next step is then to switch to TTY and then reboot the laptop.
> I'm not sure whether you mean you switch to a TTY and reboot
> intentionally because the laptop is so slow, or whether this happens
> on its own without you doing anything.
>
> If it happens automatically, it sounds like it could be the X server
> crashing.  Without the DisplayLink device connected (when everything is
> working fine) you could try running `killall X` to terminate the X
> server and see if the laptop reboots.
>
> If so then that removes the reboot as part of the problem and will put
> it down to the X server terminating unexpectedly.
>
> If terminating the X server does not trigger a reboot, it would be
> interesting to find out why the machine reboots at all.
>
>> I currently use the following configs in my X11/xorg.conf.d/
>>
>> Section "Device"
>>   Identifier "DisplayLink"
>>   Driver "modesetting"
>>   Option "PageFlip" "false"
>> EndSection
> This tells the X server to use whatever devices the kernel has grabbed
> with the modesetting driver.  I believe it's the default and probably
> has little effect.  It will also match the default onboard display
> device too, even though it's not DisplayLink.
>
> If you only want it to match the DisplayLink output you will need
> something else in here to tell X that this config only applies to a
> specific device and not all display devices it can find.  For normal
> graphic devices this would be the "BusID" parameter, but I'm not sure
> what you'd put here to match a DisplayLink device.
>
>> It has worked fine and without any issues over the past years, and the
>> problems started to occur with the version xorg-server 1.20.6.x at some
>> point.
> Has the DisplayLink driver also been updated in this time?  If you're
> using the modesetting driver then I believe X won't be talking direct
> to the hardware (just to the kernel interface, and the kernel talks to
> the hardware) so in this case it seems very unlikely that a change in
> the X server would be the root cause of the problem.  More likely one
> of the kernel drivers.  You could always try going back to an older
> kernel temporarily to see whether anything changes, and this is probably
> easier than downgrading all the Xorg packages to try the same thing on
> the userspace side.
>
>> I am happy to provide any specific log files that would help
>> troubleshoot this problem (Xorg.log or dmesg output or anything else).
> The end of the Xorg.log is probably the most useful, assuming the X
> server is terminating on its own.  No need to post the whole thing
> (yet), just have a look at the end of it and see if you can find
> anything that might explain why it's suddenly terminating.
>
> The trick will be getting the log after X terminates but before the
> machine reboots and writes a new log, by the sound of it.  You might be
> able to get the previous log after reboot as Xorg.0.log.old though.
>
> Cheers,
> Adam.
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