Arch Linux

DrKillPatient

Member

Registered: 2011-07-28

Posts: 85

Total, permanent graphics failure after xrandr --scale

I have a 13" late 2013 retina macbook pro and have just had this issue come up a second time. Given the rather large resolution of the laptop's screen, I prefer to scale the display to 1440x900 (using this script, which is essentially a wrapper for the scale command, modified for my 2560x1600 resolution). This usually works, but occasionally it results it a blank screen — the computer does not hang, as I can definitely input commands and turn it off via the power button, however, I can't see anything. The particularly awful part is that now whenever I boot after that, the screen goes permanently blank partway through loading the system. Nothing I do seems to affect it after this, and I still have no idea what changed in the first place. The only relevant entry from dmesg that I can find is as follows:

Conflicting fb usage inteldrmfb vs EFI VGA - removing generic driver
fb0: inteldrmfb frame buffer device
drm: registered panic notifier

This has happened to me twice for seemingly no reason. I'm particularly confused about its persistence, as xrandr --scale shouldn't set anything permanent, as far as I know. Once this happens, though, there appears to be no going back. The only way I fixed it last time was to reinstall Arch entirely. What can I do to fix this? I'd really like to keep using Arch on this computer but if it just stops working like this I simply can't do so.

EDIT: nomodeset allows me to boot to the virtual console but X does not start. Furthermore, I have an Intel card, so I really can't go without KMS in the long run.

Edit2: acpi_backlight=vendor plus kernel 3.12 (just released, IIRC) seems to have fixed the problem, at least temporarily... I will wait a bit to see if it happens again, however...

Last edited by DrKillPatient (2013-11-18 05:47:26)

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: Total, permanent graphics failure after xrandr --scale

Do you have early KMS set up?  Without it, I have seen all kinds of weirdness with Intel graphics.