Console timeout blanks to white instead of black

Question

My hardware screen on my laptop turns white, when the console times out and blanks, upon idling. I would expect it to normally turn black or turn off the screen entirely. When clicking a button, the screen wakes up and presents the console as normal.

There are no relevant BIOS settings.

I am running Void Linux on an HP EliteBook 8530p laptop and I don't use a desktop environment, only console CLI, thus it's not a problem with X.

• Is it a setting that determines how the "blanking" works?
• Is it possible to change the behaviour of the blanking, so it turns off the screen until a key is pressed?
• If none of the above, can you point me in a direction where I can find out if it's a hardware error?

Answer 1

As you're not using X Windows but console only, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with Linux. You should probably look into your BIOS settings.

Answer 2

If the console is using KMS (kernel mode setting), then it certainly could be a Linux issue. The drivers used for KMS (for example radeon on such hardware) are part of the Linux kernel.

We don't know, from the OP, if KMS or radeon are being used. If the answers to both of those are 'yes', then one could try booting a 3.18 or newer kernel with kernel parameter radeon.backlight=0. This might fix the problem, or could also cause a totally black screen, so be prepared to reboot under those conditions.