As I was opening my laptop today, it booted to a black screen. This happened twice and I tried waiting for 20 minutes for no avail.
I've had this issue before in Xubuntu 24.04 too, which I've temporarily dealt by opening my one-time boot menu (BIOS works too) and selecting the Ubuntu entry. I thought of doing that, just to see if it works, and it did.
I wonder what seems to be the problem in the said instances and how can I deal with it permanently. Thank you!
Not using an AMD GPU, I'm on a Latitude 5300 (i3-8145U). I did switch to Slick Greeter for now though, given the Arctica Greeter bug. It seems to work just fine for now. Maybe I'll drop an update if something goes wrong. Thanks!
It disables hardware assisted VGA virtualisation for Virtual Machines (VM)
Usually the VM gets VGA handed by the host and it will be using the VGA-driver of the host. Easy and efficient because it communicates over a socket with the Xorg-server.
VGA passthrough uses the IOMMU to let every virtual machine see the GPU directly. This is only used in very special setups but not really a good idea in other cases.
the IOMMU (Input/Output Memory Management unit) 'maps' the physical address lines of I/O-bound devices to virtual ones to support hardware assisted virtualisation.
The good part of it is that you can play FarCry 6 from within a VM.
(something nobody ever will do)
The bad part is that it might cause instabilities or result in a security issue if the driver is not 100% bugfree.
intel_iommu=igfx_off disables this hardware assisted virtualisation for the GPU.