I’ve been using Arch Linux for many years, and this is the first time I’ve encountered an issue with a rolling release update, so I decided to document my experience.

After having lunch today, I updated Arch Linux and casually ran paru. Later in the afternoon, I noticed that after booting up my laptop, it went to a black screen right after GRUB, with no cursor visible. The screen was also flickering, which suggested a potential display issue. This was unusual since display problems are typically associated with Nvidia cards, and I am using an Intel integrated GPU. But it turned out that the problem was indeed related to the Intel integrated GPU.

In the evening, after returning home, I created a live flash drive and entered the chroot environment to check the pacman update log.

First, I connected to WiFi using iwctl, then checked the hard drive with fdisk -l, and mounted the partitions:

mount /dev/nvme0n1p2 /mnt
mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt/boot

Next, I switched to the chroot environment:

arch-chroot /mnt

I reviewed the last 300 lines of the pacman log:

tail -n 300 /var/log/pacman.log | less

As expected, the kernel update was the culprit. Only six packages were updated at 13:55, so I could effectively rule out the other two packages. I quickly checked the forums, navigated to the “Kernel and Hardware” section, and found that the second post was from another victim of the same issue.

From the replies, it became clear that this issue only affects Intel’s 11th Gen integrated GPUs.

Suspected cause:

I found the names of the packages:

ls /var/cache/pacman/pkg | grep 'linux' | less

According to the wiki instructions, I downgraded these four packages:

pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/'package_name'

I rolled the Kernel back from version 5.19.12 to 5.19.11.

After exiting the chroot:

exit
umount /mnt/boot
umount /mnt

I rebooted the system, and the desktop environment was successfully restored.