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Black screen after suspend/resume (sleep/hibernate)

If your screen stays black after sleep (suspend) or hibernation (hibernate), this is one of the most common NVIDIA issues on Linux, especially on older cards.

Symptoms

Section titled “Symptoms”
  • Black screen after wake-up, but the system is not fully frozen
  • Cursor does not move, or only backlight is visible
  • Only a hard reboot helps

Step-by-step fix (Arch Linux)

Section titled “Step-by-step fix (Arch Linux)”

1) Enable NVIDIA KMS parameters in GRUB

Section titled “1) Enable NVIDIA KMS parameters in GRUB”

Open /etc/default/grub and add this to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT:

Terminal window
nvidia_drm.modeset=1 nvidia_drm.fbdev=1

Update GRUB:

Terminal window
sudo update-grub

2) Enable NVIDIA sleep/resume services

Section titled “2) Enable NVIDIA sleep/resume services”
Terminal window
sudo systemctl enable nvidia-suspend.service
sudo systemctl enable nvidia-hibernate.service
sudo systemctl enable nvidia-resume.service

3) Enable video memory preservation

Section titled “3) Enable video memory preservation”

Add this to /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf:

Terminal window
options nvidia NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations=1

If NVIDIA modules are loaded early on your system (through initramfs), regenerate initramfs:

Terminal window
sudo mkinitcpio -P

4) Reboot the system

Section titled “4) Reboot the system”

After reboot, check:

Terminal window
systemctl status nvidia-suspend.service nvidia-resume.service nvidia-hibernate.service --no-pager

If the issue remains

Section titled “If the issue remains”
  • Temporarily test an X11 session instead of Wayland
  • Make sure the nvidia module is loaded, not nouveau
  • Update the NVIDIA driver to a current branch

Source

Section titled “Source”