Nvidia will close its 2023 Linux monitor freeze bug if the complete freezes stop coming in

Nvidia says it will close the Linux external-monitor bug it has carried since 2023, but only if the complete freezes stop coming in, and it now treats a short pause on a second monitor as expected behaviour. "The original issue tracked in bug 4322356, where the external monitor froze permanently in Reverse PRIME (X11) until a VT switch, was fixed in 2024," an account carrying Nvidia's employee badge wrote on October 12. "Brief 1-2 second pauses while resizing windows are expected after that fix."

Nvidia's reply names driver 615.71.09 as the build it wants freeze logs from. Image: Nvidia Image: Nvidia

The post went up at 10:44 UTC in the forum topic "External monitor freezes when using dedicated GPU", which was opened on September 5, 2023 and has collected 314 posts from owners running a second display off a dedicated Nvidia card.

The closure is conditional and has not happened

What Nvidia committed to is a condition rather than a date: "If we don't hear of complete freezes on current drivers, we'll close the original bug as fixed. You can post here anytime and we'll reopen." The bug stays open until Nvidia decides the reports have stopped, and the quoted line about pauses covers window resizing after the 2024 fix, not every pause on every setup.

Nvidia also split two reports out of the thread on the same day. The full-system freeze one owner gets when moving the cursor to an external monitor on KDE Wayland "looks like a different issue from this thread, and we'll track it separately using your bug report", and a freeze tied to HDMI audio and turning off the TV "also looks different".

Nvidia wants three things from anyone still freezing

The reply asks a reporter who logged freezes on drivers 595.45.04 and 610.43.02 for a specific set of evidence:

• nvidia-bug-report.sh output captured during or right after a complete freeze, "ideally on 615.71.09"
• dmesg or journalctl lines from around the freeze, "especially kdispApplyWarForBug3385499 ... timeout" messages
• both monitors' resolution and refresh rate, "and whether the freeze also happens when they match"

That second request names an older internal bug, 3385499, as the source of the log line Nvidia is looking for. The third picks up something an owner wrote in the thread in August, that choosing display resolutions with matching refresh rates on both monitors cuts the pauses considerably.

Two owners replied within eight hours of the post, and neither withdrew a freeze. One says the recent drivers made Wayland usable and that the machine now locks up about once every two days under light use; the other offers a theory about the switch between an Intel-driven internal panel and an Nvidia-driven HDMI output. Those are reports from users, not Nvidia's account of a defect.

The same forum is where Nvidia filed a fourth tracking bug against Xid 109 crash reports on October 8, and where it is working through the feedback that followed the Linux driver it shipped on October 7.

Whether 4322356 closes now depends on the thread going quiet, and on nobody producing nvidia-bug-report.sh output from a complete freeze on 615.71.09.