Re: System hard lock when closing lid(2nd try)

[Peter Clifton <pcjc2@cam.ac.uk>]

On Sat, 2007-10-27 at 14:20 +0200, Raúl Sánchez Siles wrote:
> Hello:
> 
> Peter Clifton wrote:
> 
> > 
> > On Fri, 2007-10-26 at 17:41 +0200, Raúl Sánchez Siles wrote:
> >>   Hello All:
> >> 
> >>   Some time ago(2007/09/17) I wrote this e-mail:
> >> 
> >> Raúl Sánchez Siles wrote:
> >> 
> >> >   Hello all:
> >> > 
> >> >   I've searched for a more user related ML, but this is the closest
> >> >   I've
> >> > found. I own a Dell inspiron 510m laptop which include the HW listed at
> >> > [1]
> >> > 
> > >   As you can see there the graphics card is an intel 855GM. The newer
> xorg
> > > intel driver tries to save power by disabling one of the video output
> > > pipes of the card, the one that could drive an external VGA monitor. As
> a
> > > result, someone told me that the system enters in SMM (System Management
> > > Mode), leaves the system in such a state that the system ends up locking
> > > totally: no ssh connection or sys-rq combination works, just hard power
> > > off. More details at https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11432
> >> 
> >>   The lid problem stills exist on a current Xorg version, even with intel
> >> video driver git version. I'm not surprised since I suspect heavily on a
> >> BIOS problem. I'm coming back with more attached info:
> > 
>   Thanks a lot for your reply, Peter. :)
> 
> > There is probably a BIOS issue (from reports I've seen on this issue),
> > however the git version of the xserver-xorg-video-intel driver does not
> > address a couple of crashes with 855 hardware which are caused by the X
> > driver writing registers in the card.
> > 
> >
> http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~pcjc2/ubuntu/xserver-xorg-video-intel_2.1.1-0ubuntu10~pcjc2.2.diff.gz
> 
> > 
> > Shows the diff applied to a (yet unreleased) Ubuntu package for the
> > drivers. (Applies against 2.1.1 release version). You should be able to
> > find the patches in the debian/patches/ dir which the diff creates.
> > 
> I've been following this thread on the xorg-devel ML, and I have those
> patches queued for testing ;)
> 
> > It might be worth looking at these, and revisiting the BIOS issue if (as
> > is unfortunately likely) if there remains an issue.
> > 
> 
> If you pay attention to https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11432 I
> had published there a patch (comment #23) there that has been happily
> working for me since I post it (yet it works). But what it does is ugly and
> has drawbacks as explained there so I still consider it a workaround and
> not a final solution.
> 
> That's the reason I came here, to check out wether the Linux kernel could
> address the issue.

I guess this depends on whether it turns out to be ACPI code which is
poking the video chip when you close / open the lid. Please try the
above patches without the patch from comment #23, as there is a chance
it will still improve things. (It'd be good to identify which cases it
does help in).

There might of course be a similar test required in the display
detection code which enables PipeA temporarily, as in the Video overlay
enable code. If it still crashes with the patches I wrote, it would be
good to find out exactly what line in the driver locks the system up in
your case. I guess it might be a register access to PIPEACONF somewhere.

For the patches I made, I added lots of driver print messages, before
and after suspect register accesses, added a sync(); call after each
message, and got my tester to work with hard-drive write-caching
switched off. (This got the log entries previous to the hang to disk.)

Please let us know on the xorg mailing-list if you discover anything
interesting!

Regards,

-- 
Peter Clifton

Electrical Engineering Division,
Engineering Department,
University of Cambridge,
9, JJ Thomson Avenue,
Cambridge
CB3 0FA

Tel: +44 (0)7729 980173 - (No signal in the lab!)

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