Recent Update Causing Lenovo/NVIDIA External Monitor Graphics Problems
I have a Lenovo W520 laptop with an NVIDIA Quadro 1000M graphics card/chipset running Fedora 20 and the kmod-nvidia drivers. After a recent update, any external monitor I plug in now looks wavy like it's out of sync. Also, after turning on the laptop, the Fedora login screen acts as though there is an external monitor plugged in, even though there is none.
The waviness is a horizontal scattering, pictured below. It doesn't stay still; the scattering is in constant random motion. And the monitor blinks to black frequently as well. This happens to both a monitor plugged in via VGA, and a DVI one plugged into an adapter which is plugged into the laptop's DisplayPort++.
At the Fedora login screen, all I can see on my laptop display is the gray background. But I can move my mouse off to the left, presumably where there is a ghost monitor and were the login box is displayed. If I press Enter, type my password, then press Enter again, I log in. After I log in, Fedora acts as though there is no external monitor, as I have configured in the Displays settings.
If I have no external monitor plugged in and I open the Fedora Displays settings, two displays are shown. I believe the extra one is for my VGA port.
In my BIOS, under: Config > Display > Graphics Device, I have Discrete Graphics selected (as opposed to Integrated Graphics or NVIDIA Optimus). Also, OS Detection for NVIDIA Optimus is Disabled. This is how I had it set before the update, and it worked before.
Here are lists of what was updated, and my currently installed NVIDIA, X11, and kernel packages: http://pastebin.com/xXkW5bkM
Right after booting up with no external monitor plugged in, I ran nvidia-bug-report, and the result is here: https://s3.amazonaws.com/pgn674/nvidia-bug-report_after-boot.log
After that, I plugged in my DVI/DisplayPort++ monitor and used the Displays settings to enable it, and ran the NVIDIA bug report again: https://s3.amazonaws.com/pgn674/nvidia-bug-report_with-display.log
Does anyone know what might be wrong? Is there any other information that might be helpful in troubleshooting this? Or if there is a better place to ask this question, can you point me there?
Thank you for any help.
It's probably not much help, but the only time I've seen anything like this is with an analogue connection and with a loose cable, so I can only suggest you check this.
What happens if you boot up an older, perhaps the previous (and known working) kernel from the Grub menu? Does that make it work?
It's not a physical problem, as it happens on two different monitors with two different cabled plugged into both the VGA and the DisplayPort++.
I hadn't tried selecting a previous kernel; that's a good idea.
But before I tried that, I ran another update, and things changed. After the update, GNOME would no longer start. Xorg.0.log complained that it could not load the nv kernel module. I tried removing and regenerating /etc/X11/xorg.conf, but I got complaints of the nvidia kernel module not being found.
I tried uninstalling all kmod-nvidia and xorg-x11-drv-nvidia, and I was able to boot up fine on the nouveau driver. In the past, the nouveau driver has produced artifacts on my external monitor, but now it seems to be working mostly fine with my external monitor. The only problem is that graphics movement is quite choppy, which is annoying ...(more)