Arch Linux

firefly431

Member

Registered: 2016-02-20

Posts: 14

[SOLVED] Black screen after sys update (EDIT: nouveau driver problem)

It'd been a while since I'd last updated my system, so I ran pacman -Syu as usual. I rebooted (systemctl reboot), and I was met with a black screen. Before that, there was a small amount of text that flashed for a moment (I took a picture).

:: running early hook [udev]
starting version 230
:: running early hook [lvm2]

(green and white lines)

Both "rescue" and "emergency" kernel parameters don't work.

EDIT:
"init=/bin/sh" doesn't work either.

Using "loglevel=7" gets me many more messages, but I can't read them all.

[drm] Initialized drm 1.1.0 20060810
wmi: Mapper loaded
input: Power Button as /devices/LMXSYSTM:00/LM... (video is cut off at this point)
ACPI: Power Button (PWRB)
input: Power Button as /devices/LMXSYSTM:00/LM...
ACPI: Power Button [PRBF]
MXM: GUID detected in BIOS
fb: switching to nouveaufb from EFI VGA

I think it's a problem with Nouveau? I'll try to disable modesetting and lower the runlevel.

EDIT: Success! I'm able to login under single-user mode (had to Alt-F2 as for some reason I just got a black screen) and everything seems to work.
EDIT: Previous edit sounds like display works too. Still broken.

Last edited by firefly431 (2016-07-30 14:16:27)

smmilut

Member

Registered: 2011-09-15

Posts: 6

Re: [SOLVED] Black screen after sys update (EDIT: nouveau driver problem)

Hi,

Your issue could be similar to mine on this other thread : https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=214856 or maybe one of the other issues i reference there.

I'm not sure to understand the meaning of your second EDIT : i seem to understand that after disabling modesetting you do get an image on the virtual terminals (Alt+F2), but none on Xorg, is that right?
If so that's normal i think, because from what i understand nouveau won't be able to start Xorg without KMS.

Are you able to access your system in a way that allows you to provide more information?

For example :

• what type of card do you have?

  lspci | grep VGA

• the pacman.log of the upgrade could help understand what version change could have caused the issue

• the dmesg containing the bug (the initial problem when you don't disable modesetting) is useful to the nouveau guys to debug the issues. In my case, in order to get it i had to access my computer remotely from ssh because i had no image on the monitor

From the advice i got elsewhere and which worked for me in my similar case, you could try downgrading your kernel, and/or using the lts kernel.

firefly431

Member

Registered: 2016-02-20

Posts: 14

Re: [SOLVED] Black screen after sys update (EDIT: nouveau driver problem)

Thanks for replying. Yes, that seems to be the same issue. These two bugs also seem to be the same.
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94990
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=97066

How should I go about downgrading the kernel?

sherrellbc

Member

Registered: 2014-05-26

Posts: 112

Re: [SOLVED] Black screen after sys update (EDIT: nouveau driver problem)

How should I go about downgrading the kernel?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/do … the_kernel

firefly431

Member

Registered: 2016-02-20

Posts: 14

Re: [SOLVED] Black screen after sys update (EDIT: nouveau driver problem)

Thanks! I could boot into the system, so I just used the pacman cache. Everything works fine! I'll be monitoring those bugs to see if they get fixed in a later update.