Bug 35718

Summary: modprobe radeon modeset=1 causes screen to fade from black to white and back
Product: xorg Reporter: Cillian de Róiste <cillian.deroiste>
Component: Driver/RadeonAssignee: xf86-video-ati maintainers <xorg-driver-ati>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact: Xorg Project Team <xorg-team>
Severity: normal    
Priority: medium CC: cillian.deroiste
Version: unspecified   
Hardware: x86-64 (AMD64)   
OS: Linux (All)   
See Also: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25052
Whiteboard:
i915 platform: i915 features:
Attachments:
Description Flags
Output of /var/log/messages after modprobe -v drm debug=15 && modprobe -v radeon modeset=1
none
lspci -vv
none
Kernel config none

Description Cillian de Róiste 2011-03-27 07:21:16 UTC 
Created attachment 44912 [details] [review]
Output of /var/log/messages after modprobe -v drm debug=15 && modprobe -v radeon modeset=1

Linux: 2.6.37.1 SMP x86_64 GNU/Linux
X.Org X Server: 1.9.5
xf86-video-ati: 6.14.1

Steps to reproduce:
Boot to a shell without starting Xorg, neither drm nor radeon have been loaded.
modprobe -v drm debug=15
modprobe -v radeon modeset=1

The screen (terminal) goes black and gradually turns white (in a distorted way) after about 2 seconds it turns black again.

(output from /var/log/messages attached) 

The microcode seems to get loaded correctly, fbcon is compiled into the kernel (config attached)

Note that this is without starting Xorg at all, should I submit a bugreport to the kernel instead? I can start Xorg, login (via slim or kdm) it appears to not notice a problem at all.
Comment 1 Cillian de Róiste 2011-03-27 07:23:41 UTC 
Created attachment 44913 [details]
lspci -vv
Comment 2 Cillian de Róiste 2011-03-27 07:24:44 UTC 
Created attachment 44914 [details]
Kernel config
Comment 3 Alex Deucher 2011-03-27 13:42:31 UTC 
Can you attach your xorg log as well?  Does 2.6.38 work ok?
Comment 4 Cillian de Róiste 2011-03-27 15:04:30 UTC 
Using the drm-radeon-testing branch on git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/airlied/drm-2.6.git 
38f1cff0863809587b5fd10ecd0c24c8b543a48c

I can boot to the console, "modprobe drm" and "modprobe radeon modeset=1" and then start Xorg and it works perfectly. Suspend-to-disk also works (Woohoo! .. and much better than with fglrx by the looks of things!).

This has resolved the issue for me personally, but I have noticed that if I start Xorg automatically (via upstart) I get a similar problem, I have also tried booting with "radeon.modeset=1" on the kernel command line and in a separate attempt with "options radeon modeset=1" in the module options. The screen no longer fades as it did before, it is either black or white, with some regular dotted vertical lines in green or pink.

I guess an old Xorg.0.log is no longer of interest. I'm happy to try other options and will probably track the drm-radeon-testing branch and report any improvements or regressions as I come across them, but I'm happy to close this ticket as resolved.

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