Re: Screen corruption and crash at boot with Xen 4.1.0 & linux 2.6.39 on some systems

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

On Thu, Jun 02, 2011 at 02:08:03PM +0100, Anthony Wright wrote:
> I have a custom built system based on LFS 6.6 with xen 4.1.0 & linux 2.6.39 built from source. The system boots correctly on one system (after a problem with the USB disk has been worked around), however when I try to boot the same system on another machine the screen corrupts shortly after handover from the bootloader. This happens on 2 out of the 3 machines I have tried it on.
> 
> I was originally using xen 4.1.0 & linux 2.6.38.7, and with this combination the bootloader would work correctly, xen would work correctly and it would crash and the screen corrupt on the handover from xen to linux. I had a hunt around and found http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenPVOPSDRM which talks about the graphics subsystem and says "What is boils down to is: if you want to use a stock kernel from ftp.kernel.org wait till 2.6.39 gets released". As a result I have switched to xen 4.1.0 & linux 2.6.39 but get the same result.

We missed a couple of patches and had to revert some.
> 
> The motherboard is a Gigabit GA-MA69VM-S2.
> 
> The lspci -vvv output is attached.
> 
> What I did notice is the way the screen resolution changes during boot is different for the two main machines that I test on. On the machine that works, instead of the 80x25 console that I'm used to with xen 3.4.1, I get a much higher resolution output with two penguins at the top with 4.1.0. When I boot the system without the xen hypervisor linux starts at the 80x25 resolution but then quickly puts the screen into high resolution. On the machine that fails, when I boot the system without the xen hypervisor, linux starts at 80x25 resolution, appears to do a resolution change (whole screen flickers) a few seconds later but leaves the resolution at 80x25.
> 
> Am I doing something wrong? Is this a bug? Is there a workaround? Should I try a different kernel version?

Try git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/konrad/xen.git stable/2.6.39.x

and if that does not work, on top of that branch, also try reverting these two patches:

03a80665341bbb9a57064c2ddeca13b554d56893
("drm/radeon/nouveau: fix build regression on alpha due to Xen changes.)
and 
d87dfdbfc91c5e37288e7e8f7afdd992ba61a60d.
("Revert "ttm: Utilize the DMA API for pages that have TTM_PAGE_FLAG_DMA32 set.")

> 
> I'm happy to live with the 80x25 resolution screen but none of the screen resolution options that I've tried have had any effect.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Anthony.


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