Screen has black squares intermittently - "BadWindow" messages

[Autodave]

Is this one of those with 2 video cards in it? I believe that it might be. Is it possible to disable either one of them in the BIOS? Has the BIOS been updated?

[oygle]

Is this one of those with 2 video cards in it? I believe that it might be. Is it possible to disable either one of them in the BIOS? Has the BIOS been updated?

From https://downloads.dell.com/manuals/a...indd%3AVideo_1 there is only one video card. The BIOS is updated. Thanks for your help though.

[him610]

What happens if you remove the nvidia drivers and just use the nouveau driver only?

[Autodave]

I may be wrong, but when I look at the specs from the link that the OP provided, I seem to think that there are 2 cards here: the on-board one and then the nVidia one.

[oygle]

What happens if you remove the nvidia drivers and just use the nouveau driver only?

Good idea. I'll have to backup everything first though. Nothing worse than no monitor when trying to troubleshoot.

I may be wrong, but when I look at the specs from the link that the OP provided, I seem to think that there are 2 cards here: the on-board one and then the nVidia one.

Dell have advised that the nVidia GPU is a chip , and the integrated GPU is part of the CPU. There are still thousands of these messages in .xsession-errors

qt.qpa.xcb: QXcbConnection: XCB error: 3 (BadWindow), sequence: 30742, resource id: 46247738, major code: 18 (ChangeProperty), minor code: 0

Also, noticed this in the boot log

kernel: nvidia: loading out-of-tree module taints kernel.
kernel: nvidia: module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel.
kernel: Disabling lock debugging due to kernel taint

The following from

inxi -Fzx

Device-1: Intel Haswell-ULT Integrated Graphics vendor: Dell driver: i915 v: kernel bus ID: 00:02.0
Device-2: NVIDIA GM108M [GeForce 840M] vendor: Dell driver: nvidia v: 470.57.02 bus ID: 08:00.0
Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.11 driver: modesetting,nvidia unloaded: fbdev,nouveau,vesa
resolution: 1366x768~60Hz
OpenGL: renderer: NVIDIA GeForce 840M/PCIe/SSE2 v: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 470.57.02 direct render: Yes

[oygle]

I have made no changes to the drivers. On the 7th Sept I changed the Firefox settings as per How To Fix Firefox Black Screen Issue , and there have been no problems since. So I will have to assume that fixed it, and will mark this as solved.

(The "BadWindow" messages still appear in .xsession-errors , however I think that is a QT bug)

[oygle]

Just an update - I have not had the black square issues since following the advice in regards to a Firefox configuration ( https://techcult.com/how-to-fix-fire...-screen-issue/ ). Currently have 35 tabs open and no black squares at all. So it is fixed/resolved.