In an earlier post, I already wrote about how to install the proprietary video driver on Fedora. In a brief update I suggested to change the acpi_sleep kernel option to accomplish proper display wake-up from standby. Unfortunately, that solution doesn’t work reliably in my experience. Today I found a solution that seems to successfully work around the problem of the black screen by waking up the screen „manually“.

Gernot Walzl wrote a „nasty workaround“ (quoting himself) in the form of the following script:

#!/bin/sh

# nvidia_dpms_fix.sh
# 2011-06-12
# by Gernot WALZL

# nasty workaround for nvidia drivers to resume from dpms off/suspend

export DISPLAY=:0

getXauthority () {
  export XAUTHORITY=$(ps -C X -f | grep "$DISPLAY" \
    | sed -n 's/.* -auth \([^ ]*\).*/\1/p')
}

handle_line () {
  if echo "$1" | grep -e "(EE) NVIDIA.* DisplayPort link training failed" \
      > /dev/null; then
    getXauthority
    xset dpms force on
  fi
}

tail --follow=name /var/log/Xorg.0.log --retry --lines=1 2> /dev/null \
  | while read line; do
    handle_line "$line"
  done

To actually make this do its job, I copied it into /usr/local/bin, made it executable and created an autostart entry for GNOME 3 by saving the following lines under ~/.config/autostart/nvidia_dpms_fix.sh.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=/usr/local/bin/nvidia_dpms_fix.sh
Hidden=false
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
Name=NVidia DPMS fix
Comment=Wakes up the display properly

I believe the problem that is being worked around is indicated by a line in the Xorg.0.log:

(WW) NVIDIA(GPU-0): AUO (DFP-3): Failed to set DisplayPort power state

Although I could only test this on my machine (HP EliteBook 8440p), with some luck this works for all cases where a similar log message is found.