Intermittent black screen on HP EliteBook 840 G1

Update on behavior: the last few times the internal display went black, I did not touch the keyboard and mouse at all, and the display came back after a few seconds. (Tested with the laptop in the port replicator and an external display connected via the DP port.)

Michael von Glasow, thank you for reporting this and helping make Ubuntu better.

Could you please run the following command once from a terminal by ensuring you have the package xdiagnose installed, and that you click the Yes button for attaching additional debugging information:
apport-collect 1715749

When reporting xorg related bugs in the future, please do so via the above method. You can learn more about this functionality at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs.

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Michael von Glasow, could you please update your HWE stack as per https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack and advise to the results?

Update done. I’ll keep an eye on this and report back if I encounter the issue again (or do not encounter it for a longer time—being a sporadic bug, it’s difficult to tell if it’s gone away for good).

Well, that didn’t take long: screen just went black again for somewhere around a second. Let me know if you need further input from me.

BTW: currently working without a dock, with an external screen attached via DP (which has also experienced the bug before the update)—so the dock doesn’t make a difference.

Michael von Glasow:

1) To clarify, did this issue start to happen after an update? If so, which specifically?

2) Does this issue happen if you don't have any external displays, and the laptop is not docked?

3) Regarding the internal laptop display going black for a few seconds, how often does this occur per hour, day, etc.?

Re 1: the issue started to happen after I moved the hard disk to the 840 G1 (from a 6930p), which was around August/September. Updates usually get installed within a day (unless I have only limited Internet access, which was not the case when I switched laptops), thus the system should have been fairly up-to-date at the time.

Re 2: I will keep an eye on this, may take a while though (most of the time the system is docked or has an external display connected).

Re 3: I would say several times per day (i.e. 8–16 hours of usage), every few hours on average. I’ll keep an eye on it and report back.

I'm currently working without an external display and without a docking station/port replicator, and the screen just went black for a couple of seconds. The system had been running for 1–2 hours at the time.

Michael von Glasow, if you disable the laptop turning the screen off or dimming after inactivity via the GUI, does this still happen?

I just set the screen timeout to Never; dimming was already disabled. I did this only for the AC profile, not the battery profile, as I’m on AC power most of the time. I’ll report back if the screen goes black again (or if it doesn’t happen for a while).

And the screen just went black again. I haven’t rebooted since I changed the settings; I will report if I still experience issues after a reboot, just to be sure.

18.04 LTS is just around the corner and I will be upgrading soon. Is there any more information you’d like me to gather while still on 16.04? Please let me know; otherwise I will post any news on how this behavior also affects 18.04 once I’ve upgraded and used it for a while.

After today’s updates, I am seeing another strange issue: whenever all displays go out due to inactivity and I touch the keyboard or mouse again, the internal display starts to flicker. It looks as if the entire image is shifted by some 25% of its width to one side, then to the other (with the part that would be outside the display area wrapping around to the other end of the display). It flickers back and forth between the two offsets somewhere near the refresh rate. So far I’ve always been able to recover by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1 to go to a tty, then Ctrl+Alt+F7 to return to the MATE desktop. Not sure if it’s related.

Forgot to add, the laptop’s currently docked with an external display on DisplayPort.

Michael von Glasow, to clarify, what update are you referring to? Package(s) update (which specifically) or updating the OS to 18.04?

I am referring to package updates, still on 16.04, whatever was made available on the repos in the last ~24 hours before comment #33. (Is there an install log which will tell me what was updated when?)

I noticed another issue recently: when the device displays woke up after a period of inactivity, the picture of the external (!) display was stretched vertically by a factor of 2, with the bottom half missing. I took a screenshot, but that looked OK and didn’t reflect what I actually saw.

Also, with the original issue, I tried switching to a text console (Ctrl+Alt+F1) and back to the GUI (Ctrl+Alt+F7), but the internal display remained black and came back to life long after the main one. Looks like switching to a text console and back to the GUI has no effect.

Currently still on 16.04.

I upgraded to 18.04 last week. So far none of the screen issues (black screen or image corruption) has reappeared; I will post an update if anything comes up.

The black screen issue reappeared on 18.04 sometime last week, after two completely trouble-free months, and it is quite frequent again. I haven’t done and in-depth diagnosis or troubleshooting so far. The flicker issue hasn’t appeared since I upgraded.

And the issue described in comment#37 is also back. This time, however, after doing Ctrl+Alt+F1, everything was black (except for the cursor blinking on the internal display), and I was unable to switch back to the GUI with Ctrl+Alt+F7; I ended up having to cold boot the system using the power button.

Let me know if you need further details.

For the issue in #37, I was able to restore the external display by undocking and re-docking the laptop.

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

I have exactly the same problem described in the title since 2018-11-27, when I bought this laptop.

My configuration:
HP Elitebook 840 G1
Ubuntu 18.04

The same issue does not hit Windows, which I dual boot with.

I have exactly the same problem too with the same computer. I also have ubuntu on a dual boot with Windows.

Black internal screen on my G1 820 too. May be its a problem with function "lower screen intensity when inactive" (energy), i have disabled it now.

@Maik Schulze did that change anything? are you still getting the error?

Just had a look at my own settings: I have "Dim display when idle" unchecked in the AC power tab, checked in the Battery tab. I am still getting a dark screen every now and then, even though I mostly work on AC power.

I'm having the same issue on Mint 19.3.

Just installed mint a couple days ago.

Laptop is docked with 1 external monitor attached. The laptop screen goes black for a few seconds at a time. External monitor stays active, and I can use the external monitor as usual during the blackout. The black laptop screen come back to life on its own, and all is back to normal.

Happens every few hours.

Here's inxi:

$ inxi -Fxz
System: Host: hp840 Kernel: 5.3.0-42-generic x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 7.4.0 Desktop: Cinnamon 4.4.8
           Distro: Linux Mint 19.3 Tricia base: Ubuntu 18.04 bionic
Machine: Type: Laptop System: Hewlett-Packard product: HP EliteBook 840 G1 v: A3009DD10303 serial: <filter>
           Mobo: Hewlett-Packard model: 198F v: KBC Version 15.59 serial: <filter> BIOS: Hewlett-Packard v: L71 Ver. 01.44
           date: 04/12/2018
Battery: ID-1: BAT0 charge: 40.9 Wh condition: 41.2/41.2 Wh (100%) model: Hewlett-Packard Primary status: Unknown
CPU: Topology: Dual Core model: Intel Core i7-4600U bits: 64 type: MT MCP arch: Haswell rev: 1 L2 cache: 4096 KiB
           flags: lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx bogomips: 21550
           Speed: 898 MHz min/max: 800/3300 MHz Core speeds (MHz): 1: 2252 2: 2779 3: 1354 4: 2266
Graphics: Device-1: Intel Haswell-ULT Integrated Graphics vendor: Hewlett-Packard driver: i915 v: kernel bus ID: 00:02.0
           Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.5 driver: modesetting unloaded: fbdev,vesa
           resolution: 1600x900~60Hz, 1920x1080~60Hz
           OpenGL: renderer: Mesa DRI Intel Haswell Mobile v: 4.5 Mesa 19.2.8 direct render: Yes
Audio: Device-1: Intel Haswell-ULT HD Audio vendor: Hewlett-Packard driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel bus ID: 00:03.0
           Device-2: Intel 8 Series HD Audio vendor: Hewlett-Packard driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel bus ID: 00:1b.0
           Device-3: Audio-Technica type: USB driver: hid-generic,snd-usb-audio,usbhid bus ID: 2-1.2.4.4:11
           Sound Server: ALSA v: k5.3.0-42-generic
Network: Device-1: Intel Ethernet I218-LM vendor: Hewlett-Packard driver: e1000e v: 3.2.6-k port: 3080 bus ID: 00:19.0
           IF: enp0s25 state: up speed: 1000 Mbps duplex: full mac: <filter>
           Device-2: Intel Wireless 7260 driver: iwlwifi v: kernel port: ef80 bus ID: 02:00.0
           IF: wlo1 state: down mac: <filter>
Drives: Local Storage: total: 223.57 GiB used: 91.40 GiB (40.9%)
           ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: Intel model: SSDSC2BF240A4H size: 223.57 GiB
Partition: ID-1: / size: 219.06 GiB used: 91.40 GiB (41.7%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda1
Sensors: System Temperatures: cpu: 43.0 C mobo: N/A
           Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A
Info: Processes: 226 Uptime: 52m Memory: 15.54 GiB used: 2.85 GiB (18.3%) Init: systemd runlevel: 5 Compilers: gcc: 7.5.0
           Shell: bash v: 4.4.20 inxi: 3.0.32

I experienced this issue in Linux Mint 20.03 (Cinnamon) and in Debian Buster (KDE) as well.

I have the same issue with a fresh install of kubuntu 22.04 LTS on an HP 820 G1. Random screen blackout -- machine can only be revived by a reboot. The Windows operating system that was replaced by kubuntu worked flawlessly (except that it was Windows, which is one hell of a flaw).

Update -- possibly resolved by upgrading to kubuntu 22.10.
I installed that and so far ... fingers crossed, no more black screens.
Jon