Ubuntu 16.04 screen completely freezes only mouse moves

Question

Ever since I have upgraded my laptop (Click here for hardware specs.) my screen usually freezes. Mostly in chrome or Firefox browser. I am pretty sure this is a Nvidia driver problem but I can't seem to find the solution. I am running a Nvidia Quadro K2100M.

I am currently running Nvidia 361.42. I have tried using open source Xorg server without any luck.

The only solution I have found so far is forcefully turning off the computer by holding down the power button.

Things that I have tried:

1. I got keyboard input
2. I cannot switch to another terminal to restart lightdm

Answer 1

Updating the grub settings worked for me! Do the following:

1. Open the GRUB configuration

sudo vi /etc/default/grub

2. Change the value of GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT from "quiet splash" to

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash intel_idle.max_cstate=1"

and save the file.

3. Update & Reboot

sudo update-grub
sudo reboot

More info:

This is a bug in the processor, known as the c-state bug. It causes total freezes when the CPU tries to enter an unsupported sleep state. It's a problem for many Bay Trail devices especially with newer (4.*) kernels. There is a simple workaround until it gets properly fixed upstream. You just need to pass a kernel boot parameter and the random freezing stops completely. The parameter may increase battery consumption slightly, but it will give you a usable system. You do this by editing the configuration file for GRUB as described above.

GRUB - boot loader package from the GNU Project, which provides a user the choice to boot one of multiple operating systems installed on a computer or select a specific kernel configuration available on a particular operating system's partitions;

Intel Bay Trail - new Atom Processors from Intel. Atom is Intel's family of x86 and x86-64 processors that are optimized for small computing devices, such as smartphones and mobile Internet devices;

C-States - used to optimize optimize or reduce power consumption in idle mode (i. e. when no code is executed) - (C0 to C8)

Reference: here.

Answer 2

This problem came to me occasionally, making me really annoyed.

As illustrated in many blogs, this may be caused by graphic driver problem. For me, my desktop has a NVIDIA video card, you can run lspci | grep VGA to see what type of your video type, in my case, it returned:

02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G98 [GeForce 8400 GS Rev. 2] (rev a1)

I followed the instruction on jiakai zhang's blog to reinstall proper drivers for the desktop, hope this will help you.

The key steps in [1] are to reinstall the ubuntu desktop and nvidia drivier by:

$ sudo su 
$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop
$ apt-get install unity
$ apt-get remove --purge nvidia*
$ reboot
$ sudo apt-get install nvidia-current
$ sudo reboot