Dell XPS 9710 crashes on display suspend / sleep while docked

Hi,

maybe this will be helpful to somone else with a similar setup. 

I'm using a Dell XPS 9710 with at WD19 USB-C and a WD19 Thunderbolt dock. I have 2 Dell displays attached to dock, one U2515H and one U2518D. Both displays are daisy chained using DP-MST. I have had no issues with this setup using an older 9570. 

Since I started using the new 9710 I ran into the problem that about 80-90% of the time the displays are put to sleep, the machine reboots with a bluescreen. When analyzing the memory dump it was always the intel-graphics-driver that failed. However multiple dignostic tests, reinstalls of the OS (win10 and win11) using dell or intel/nvidia reference drivers helped. Or changing the display order, cables, ports etc.

The issue was only present when the device was docked with external displays. The internal displays had no issues with going to sleep / waking up.

The perliminary solution was to disable monitor sleep while docked. However as some windows updates fiddle with these settings I got fed up and invested a bit more time to troubleshoot the issue.

As it turns out the issue is only present when the older U2515H display is attached. The newer display alone (or 2 of them) work well.

My first success was to attach the U2515H via HDMI, that stopped the bluescreens immediatley. However I wanted to drive the displays via DP. I remembered some DP 1.2 setting in the monitor's OSD and disabled it. That means the daisy-chaining and MST is gone as well, however it defaults to a more simple DP implementation. For the last two days I can use both displays without issues, the older one running with DP 1.2 disabled.

There seems to be some compatibility issue with the docks or the igfx and the older U2515H. I can't see the firmware Version of the older display in the OSD - and the display has been out of warranty for quite some time...

Maybe this will save someone some headaches...

by

Darky