Arch Linux

borisbsc

Member

Registered: 2013-04-19

Posts: 29

[Solved] OSS radeon driver without 'nomodeset' causes lockup

I have a HP EliteBook 8570p with a discreet AMD Radeon 7570M and after updating Arch today I can't boot the system anymore. The screen goes black right after GRUB, when the console display mode should change. Keyboard lights become unresponsive and not even SysRq works, the only way to reboot is via the power switch.

The only way to boot successfully is to add 'nomodeset' via GRUB when booting, but then the radeon driver doesn't work since it requires KMS. I don't think it's related to X because even if I disable DM the screen still goes black right after GRUB. There is nothing in journalctl from failed boots - there are entries from 'nomodeset' boots, but between them nothing, like failed boots never happened.

I suspected that maybe it's something with the latest kernel so I installed 'linux-lts' and ran 'grub-mkconfig' which added LTS kernel to GRUB, but after booting the LTS kernel I get the same black screen.

Last edited by borisbsc (2014-10-24 23:48:27)

foobar42

Member

Registered: 2011-03-28

Posts: 12

Re: [Solved] OSS radeon driver without 'nomodeset' causes lockup

Have you tried booting multiple times? I got the same error on my desktop PC but it works after about 5 retries.

I posted about that here a few hours ago: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=188699

borisbsc

Member

Registered: 2013-04-19

Posts: 29

Re: [Solved] OSS radeon driver without 'nomodeset' causes lockup

I tried at least 20 times when trying out different things, but no luck.

moist

Member

Registered: 2013-04-21

Posts: 12

Re: [Solved] OSS radeon driver without 'nomodeset' causes lockup

Having the exact same issue on my HD6870 since yesterday (only noticed it because I rebooted after quite a while of uptime), on both the standard repo kernel and the mainline kernel from the AUR. I tried the latest Fedora Rawhide ISO as well, which behaved the same when trying to boot in to the live environment.
Arch's install medium for this month still works normally, the issues only start when I first try to boot into a new system.
I doubt it has anything to do with X considering I just use startx, and I never even make it to a tty.

matse

Member

Registered: 2011-04-27

Posts: 299

Re: [Solved] OSS radeon driver without 'nomodeset' causes lockup

Hi,
I once had this issue with my 6870 when I enabled dynamic power management. So just a guess... maybe try manually disabling dynamic power management with the

radeon.dpm=0

kernel parameter. Maybe that helps,
greetings
matse

borisbsc

Member

Registered: 2013-04-19

Posts: 29

Re: [Solved] OSS radeon driver without 'nomodeset' causes lockup

Matse, you're a genius! It worked! I was stuck on this since monday...

Thanks again.