Arch Linux

unhammer

Member

Registered: 2009-10-01

Posts: 99

Website

screen goes black (and stays so), with no warning, after last update

I've seen this thing happen twice in the last few days, after running my first pacman update since sometime before summer (beginning of June perhaps):

- the monitor goes black (but without saying that the cable is disconnected)
- I can ssh into the machine and use it as usual
- the first time, X was at 100% and I couldn't manage to kill it (but then I never found out how to do that anyway), while the second time, no processes were taking an unusual cpu percentage

…and I have no idea what to do except reset, at which point the monitor shows stuff again.

I'm running KDE. The second time it happened was during an upload using Kflickr, both times gimp had been running.

Anyone got any ideas where to start debugging this?

If it helps:
- my rc.conf
- my xorg.conf

cubeist

Member

Registered: 2010-08-01

Posts: 36

Re: screen goes black (and stays so), with no warning, after last update

it looks like you are (or were) using the proprietary fglrx ati driver.  I think when you did your system upgrade you are now on X version 1.8 which is not fully supported, and buggy with catalyst driver.... but I am not postive on this as I use open source ati.

My advice would be to follow the wiki here and switch to the opensource drivers using KMS.  My system is rock solid with these drivers, but I am not a 3D gamer.  Anyway, the opensource drivers are easy to install and should at least get your screen running again.

Last edited by cubeist (2010-08-16 18:33:02)

unhammer

Member

Registered: 2009-10-01

Posts: 99

Website

Re: screen goes black (and stays so), with no warning, after last update

I did try catalyst once, yes, but switched back to radeon because it was too buggy.

I had tried turning on early-start KMS but apparently hadn't added all the settings that were required; my /boot/grub/menu.lst said

kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/446c624a-8d7f-45bb-97c6-76a174bdb9e5 ro acpi_enforce_resources=lax resume=/dev/sda2 vga=803

I changed that to

kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/446c624a-8d7f-45bb-97c6-76a174bdb9e5 ro acpi_enforce_resources=lax resume=/dev/sda2 radeon.modeset=1

..we'll see if that helps :-)

(off-topic: does anyone know why, after changing from vga=803 to radeon.modeset=1, it no longer wants to show the "three arches" in boot?)