Re: Problem: Pattern with vertical colored lines on the dom0 screen

[Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>]

On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 03:06:14PM +0200, Dietmar Hahn wrote:
> Am 21.09.2010 schrieb Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk:
> > On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 09:19:51AM +0200, Dietmar Hahn wrote:
> > > Am 20.09.2010 schrieb Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk:
> > > > On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 03:20:11PM +0200, Dietmar Hahn wrote:
> > > > > Hi list,
> > > > > 
> > > > > I have a problem with a new laptop (reproducable on other machines too) and the
> > > > > xen hypervisor.
> > > > > When the hypervisor gets booted with VESA mode 800x600 I see some messages and
> > > > > then the screen contents is switched into a pattern of vertical colored lines
> > > > > and never comes back.
> > > > 
> > > > > In text mode all works well, but later the pattern appears when the X servers
> > > > > starts.
> > > > > I disabled VTd in the bios and now all went fine.
> > > > 
> > > > So no VT-d and the you have no trouble even with VESA 800x600? 
> > > Yes!
> > 
> > And if you have VT-d enabled and you don't include the "vga=mode-0x314" then
> > it works fine too?
> 
> Yes but only the boot process (in default text mode) until the Xserver starts.

Aaaaah, so the VT-d is a red-herring - it does not matter.

.. snip ..
> > > booting the hypervisor and before dom0 starts.
> > > Another thing is when starting the X server I see kernel messages in a loop:
> > > [ 1193.549808] [drm:i915_hangcheck_elapsed] ERROR Hangcheck timer elapsed... GPU hung
> > > [ 1193.572464] render error detected, EIR: 0x00000000
> > > [ 1193.586720] i915: Waking up sleeping processes
> > > [ 1193.600679] [drm:i915_do_wait_request] ERROR i915_do_wait_request returns -5 (awaiting 1 at 0)
> > 
> > Ugh, that looks nasty.
> 
> Yes!

I don't know much about the SLES11 kernel, but I know that I fixed a lot of KMS/DRM
issues with the PVOPS kernel. It might be that some of those fixes didn't make it
in the SLES11 kernel.

The details are on http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenPVOPSDRM

but you have an i915 and there weren't much of changes in the area.
The big one for the PVOPS was that you had to have CONFIG_DMAR enabled
so that the code for programming the GART would use the PCI API.

My recommendation is to check the .config to see if CONFIG_DMAR
was enabled for your kernel. After that, take a whirl with the
PVOPS kernel: http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenParavirtOps

Lastly, did a baremetal kernel work on this machine with X? That is
a kernel without the Xen hypervisor running alongside?