Random screen freezes on a Thinkpad X260
Recently, I upgraded my Thinkpad X260 (i7 Skylake with Intel HD 520 Graphics)
from Fedora 39 to 40. After the upgrade, I noticed random screen freezes (e.g.
in Firefox), which lasted up to a few seconds and were extremly annoying. The
problem occured in X11 with the KMS and Intel-drivers, as well as with Wayland
(sway). Logs and my investigations with perf and other tools showed no
noticeable problems. It drove me crazy. I disabled swap, set kernel
parameters,
and tried other things, but all without success. The random screen freezes
remained. Almost giving up, I was preparing to install a different
distribution, I stumbled over this post on
reddit,
which suggests to set the kernel parameter i915.enable_psr (Panel Self
Refresh) to 0. Added that to the grub configuration, rebooted, and now the
freezes are gone - finally.