Bug 27821

Summary: [i915] Switching from X to a virtual terminal while screen is fading out causes display to stay dark
Product: xorg Reporter: M. Vefa Bicakci <m.v.b>
Component: Driver/intelAssignee: Carl Worth <cworth>
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE QA Contact: Xorg Project Team <xorg-team>
Severity: normal    
Priority: medium    
Version: 7.5 (2009.10)   
Hardware: x86 (IA32)   
OS: Linux (All)   
Whiteboard:
i915 platform: i915 features:

Description M. Vefa Bicakci 2010-04-23 18:35:28 UTC
Hello,

I am using an up-to-date version of Debian Sid on a Toshiba Satellite
A100 series laptop which has an Intel video card. Here are the relevant
lines from lspci's output:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:27a2] (rev 03)
00:02.1 Display controller [0380]: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/GME, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:27a6] (rev 03)

As you can guess from the summary line, the problem is the following:
If I switch to a virtual console right at the moment xscreensaver or
gnome-screensaver is fading the screen out to black, then the screen
stays dark/blackened. The system continues to work, i.e. I am able to
log in on a virtual terminal and restart the X server to get the
display back.

However, if I get the timing really right (which is right at the end
of the fade to black) then I can't restart the X server, and my only
option is to use the magic SysRq key combinations to reboot.

This problem particularly unfortunate, as it gets triggered a lot when
the system is suspending to ram, and when I resume the system, I often
find that the system is unusable because of this issue and have to
reboot.

My current work-around is to disable the fade-out feature of
xscreensaver, but obviously this is just a work-around, and
gnome-screensaver does not have an option to disable the fade-out.

I was able to reproduce this issue with version 2.9.1 (with KMS) and
version 2.11.0 of the Intel X11 video driver.

I would be glad to provide any information necessary to debug this
problem.

Thank you.
Comment 1 M. Vefa Bicakci 2010-04-23 19:01:49 UTC
Hello again,

I was able to further work around this issue by putting a script
into /etc/pm/sleep.d which simply "sleep"s for 3 seconds on
suspend and hibernate events. This lets gnome-screensaver and
xscreensaver to fade out fully before the system actually suspends
to disk or RAM.

However, this is just another work-around.
Comment 2 Michel Dänzer 2010-04-24 08:52:51 UTC

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 27382 ***

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