Arch Linux

victorhooi

Member

Registered: 2009-08-06

Posts: 109

Blank screen on bootup, after swtich to framebuffer - fallback fails.

heya,

I know this post is going to be a bit vague, as I'm not sure where to get more debug info, and I'm not sure if this is the right group either, but hopefully so.

I'm running Arch64, with KDE-mod 4.4, with wicd, on my Lenovo X200 tablet pc.

Anyhow, basically, I did a pacman -Syu recently, and now when I reboot, Arch doesn't seem to startup properly. I believe the kernel was 2.6.32.5, or whatever the latest version is as of around 12 hours ago.

I select Arch Linux from the Grub screen, and it starts up in the old-style console (80x25, I think, right?). Then it changes, into framebuffer, I think, and after a few lines the screen goes pure black. And it seems to hang in this state for a while. I didn't quite catch the last message, I think it's something about udev, then loading modules, not sure though. Caps lock still works in the black screen mode, but it just stays there indefinitely.

I tried Arch Linux fallback mode from Grub, same deal. I was hoping to boot into that, and do a pacman update, somehow (using Wicd's ncurses interface?).

In my kernel options, I didn't see anything to turn on the switch to framebuffer, otherwise I would have tried disabling that. The only thing I added was elevator=noop, so it goes "... ro elevator=noop". (I have an SSD).

I'm not really sure how I'm going to fix this, since neither Arch nor Arch Fallback will boot up, lol, so I can't run pacman or any commands...*sigh*.

Cheers,
Victor

Last edited by victorhooi (2010-01-25 22:26:36)

falconindy

Developer

From: New York, USA

Registered: 2009-10-22

Posts: 4,111

Website

Re: Blank screen on bootup, after swtich to framebuffer - fallback fails.

Going to guess that you've got Intel graphics on there. If that's the case, you've got two options (currently):

1) add "i915.modeset=0" to your kernel options. This may, however, result in a hard crash on starting X.
2) Roll back to 2.6.31.6

The root cause is that DRM is crashing. I've got this issue on my Dell laptop, and I haven't yet been able to find a fix -- same result with newer kernels and newer libdrm/xf86-video-intel.

---

blog | ±github

florianbw

Member

Registered: 2010-01-14

Posts: 8

Re: Blank screen on bootup, after swtich to framebuffer - fallback fails.

I had the same problem, and it should be possible to fix yours the same way. I have Arch64 on a Dell E6400, Intel Graphics.

In your pacman cache you still should have some old kernels. Replace the 2.6.32.5 kernel with one of those (the newest working):

 pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/kernel26-2.6.32.2-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.gz /var/cache/pacman/pkg/kernel26-firmware-2.6.32.2-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.gz /var/cache/pacman/pkg/kernel26-headers-2.6.32.2-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.gz

For me that was 2.6.32.2; 2.6.32.3 showed the same problems as you described with .5.

Hope it works for you.

Beavis

Member

From: UK

Registered: 2005-01-01

Posts: 71

Re: Blank screen on bootup, after swtich to framebuffer - fallback fails.

I too have had a similar problem to this recently. It should be noted that I am running against the Testing repo at this time and this problem has only occurred since then.

After much trial and error I found the problem to be the microcode module from the Intel microcode_ctl package. I removed the module from my MODULES=() line in rc.conf then rebooted. After that no more black screen and no more delays at startup, it's all back to normal.

Last edited by Beavis (2010-01-26 12:25:49)

victorhooi

Member

Registered: 2009-08-06

Posts: 109

Re: Blank screen on bootup, after swtich to framebuffer - fallback fails.

heya,

Hm, adding "i916.modeset=0" seems to have done the trick, at least for now.

I suppose there's no news, or any bug report on this issue, so we can see when it's fixed? (I couldn't seem to find one).

Cheers,
Victor

dxjuy

Member

Registered: 2010-06-17

Posts: 19

Re: Blank screen on bootup, after swtich to framebuffer - fallback fails.

woo

not only me