On Fri, 5 Nov 2004, Dave Airlie wrote:

> >
> > By the way, the X server runs. There is no problem with that.
> >
> > If I start it (say, with ICE as a window manager starting up an xterm)
> > *immediately after boot* I get a clean, black screen. It should be dark
> > green. I get the frame for the xterm. No xterm. I can right click to get
> > the menu to display on the screen but it gets locked there. I can right
> > click again to get a working menu and choose to logout.
> >
> > If I do something befor starting it, the screen is filled with junk.
> > Something is writing to the video ram. If I close it and restar it,
> > different junk.

> Can you throw your .config this way as well, I've just built 2.6.9
> with i810 drm and no i810 framebuffer (CONFIG_DRM_I810 and
> !CONFIG_FB_I810) and played tuxracer just fine for a few minutes under
> a gnome session on a Fedora core 1 box with a prerelease of Xorg
> 6.8... (my i810 test machine doesn't get taken out all that often...)

Attached is the configuration file I just used after again adding the kernel
2.6.9 source tree, configuring, building, installing, booting, testing, then
removing the kernel 2.6.9 source tree, and for luck, reinstalling the 2.6.7
tree, reconfiguring, recompiling, reinstalling and rebooting then
recompiling alsa (I got in the habit of compiling from the source at
alsa-project in RH7.2 which used OSS and since alsa can be updated more
frequently than the kernel, still only include basic sound support in the
kernel and add alsa afterwards), removing the /lib/modules/2.6.9 stuff,
rebooting, testing alsa and since this is a large change to the system,
running all the cron.weekly and cron.daily scripts then running a "find" on
the whole system and checking to see if any new files were left over (none
were) to delete them.

The result?

Booting to console, starting X (X runs) with ICE (window manager) gives me a
black screen, unusable, frames for the xterm which are visually unmovable,
but the actual (new/invisible) position allows me (there) to resize them but
the xterm is not available in the frame, able to bring up the ice menu
(right click) and close down X. The video ram still seems to be unavailable.
As before.

This problem does not occur in 2.6.7. It did not occur in 2.6.8.1 (to which
I had upgraded until I tried to burn an audio CD and then went back to
2.6.7). So I ask myself, what happened to the 810 driver between 2.6.8.1 and
2.6.9? Anything? The Changelog seems to show that it had been "cleaned up".

Before reporting the problem, in case it was a problem with the build of the
xorg RPM from Fedora, I got the latest source rpm (60 meg on a dialup line,
four hour download) and rebuilt with 2.6.9 installed (hour and a half to
compile it on a 900 MHz system). That didn't fix the problem. I had tried
building the kernel with and without framebuffer support and shared mem. I
had tried commenting out every module load in the xorg.conf file. I spent
some time seeing if I could find some way around it.

This is my only system and I really can't spend more time recompiling,
installing, rebooting and trying configuration after configuration. As 2.6.7
works, I will have to stick with that (well, I could upgrade to 2.6.8.1 if
I didn't want to work with audio CDs or that with the patches necessary
to get the audio CD burning to work - I think I will stick with 2.6.7).

ATTACHED myconfig.269 (still no luck with graphics/i810)


Regards from:

    John McGowan  |  jmcgowan@inch.com                [Internet Channel]
                  |  jmcgowan@coin.org                [COIN]
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