When booting from an Ubuntu/Kubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) Live-CD/DVD for i386 or for AMD64, either normal "boot and install" or "safe graphics mode", with or without various boot parameters, the screen always turns black and stays black and the computer freezes at that point of the boot process when the GUI (Gnome/KDE) should be starting. It is not possible to get to a text console by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1 (nor F2...F12). The only thing one can do is reboot with Alt+SysRq+b. My processor is AMD64 and my graphics card is "ATI Technologies Inc RV350 AP [Radeon 9600]". There are two workarounds: 1) Boot with break=bottom, the (initramfs) prompt comes up, /chroot root, edit xorg.conf with e.g. nano and disable the module "dri" by commenting out that line, save and exit nano, type exit at the boot prompt twice, the boot process continues and the GUI comes up, everything works then. 2) Alternatively change the AGP speed from 8x to 4x in the BIOS (if it's an AGP card, not a PCI-E card). Then it is not necessary to do anything special, the normal "boot and install" option works right away. This is a confirmed Ubuntu bug for ATI graphic cards: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-ati/+bug/67487 Some people with NVidia cards reported the same problem, but other people said that they probably experience a different bug. Most people that reported the bug seem to have AMD processors, but at least one of the persons had an Intel processor. Here's the xorg.conf and Xorg.0.log that I received after commenting out the modules dri and glx (it turned out later on that it does not make a difference if one disables glx or not): http://librarian.launchpad.net/5217493/xorg.conf http://librarian.launchpad.net/5217508/Xorg.0.log If it's useful, I can also get the Xorg.0.log when only commenting out dri and not glx and when booting with AGP speed 4x and not making any changes to xorg.conf.
Created attachment 8010 [details] xorg.conf after commenting out dri and glx with initramfs
Created attachment 8011 [details] Xorg.0.log after commenting out dri and glx with initramfs
Does it also work if you set up AGP 8x in the BIOS and use Option "AGPMode" "8" in xorg.conf?
Yes, after adding Option "AGPMode" "8" to the device section of the graphics card in the xorg.conf the GUI starts while the AGP speed is set to 8x in the BIOS.
Using Option "AGPMode" "8" and having the AGP speed set to 8x in the bios fixes this problem for me as well.
I pushed a change to xf86-video-ati git which makes the radeon driver leave the AGP transfer mode and fast writes unchanged by default. I'm afraid this is too invasive for the 6.6 branch though. Is anything else needed to resolve this bug?
Created attachment 8278 [details] [review] always turn FW off unless asked for it by config file.. leave speed alone.. also use brackets, the old code gave me an error... this breaks my AGP 4x v2.0 8500 in an i845 motherboard. fastwrites gets left on and unless I explicity disable it in the xorg.conf X dies very quickly..
Looks good, please update the manpage to match the code as well.
okay fix checked into git..
Marking as fixed, reports say it did help.
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