Le 25 janvier 2012 14:36, Brian <a...@cityscape.co.uk> a écrit : > On Wed 25 Jan 2012 at 09:56:15 +0000, Rémi Moyen wrote: > >> OK, so now I get what I think should be a working up-to-date testing >> system. Rebooting on the 2.6.32 kernel works again perfectly. But >> rebooting on the 3.1 kernel starts to boot (it prints at least the >> "waiting for udev to be populated" message) and then all I get is a >> blank screen. Some messages get displayed before, but so fast that I >> have no hope to even catch a glimpse of a word. The screen flickers >> when it becomes black, at about the time where in the 2.6 kernel the >> screen resolution changes, so I guess this is the step that fails. >> With the blank screen, I can't do anything. Keyboard seems dead (at >> least "Caps Lock" doesn't respond, although "Num Lock" does). The >> machine is still alive and can be logged-on remotely, but that's all. >> I didn't see anything strange in syslog or dmesg, but I might have >> missed something. > > The Squeeze kernel is happy to use nouveau with your card so you > would expect the Wheezy one to be equally content. Testing also > produces a visible display, which surely it wouldn't if there was no > video driver to work with.
Well, I'm guessing that at the early stage of the boot some very crude driver is used and things fail when the kernel tries to load/use something more complicated. Kernel 3.1 can display something but only using the "big" characters at startup (something like 80x25, I would guess). Kernel 2.6 switches to smaller characters very early in the boot sequence and I am guessing that this is when attempting that that the kernel 3.1 fails. But that's just a guess and doesn't really help me... Also, I noticed that when I did a first install with graphical environment, X was working with the 2.6 kernel (obviously not with the 3.1...) and the xorg.0.log was saying something along the lines of "searching a driver for your card, trying (in this order) nouveau, nv, vesa" (not the exact messages, but that was the gist of it). Then error messages about not being able to load nouveau (with the 2.6 kernel, again, so why was it not working there?), same errors for nv (which was normal because at that point I had not installed the xserver-xorg-video-nv package so I was not expecting X to be able to use it) and finally doing some stuff with vesa (it might have been trying something with "fb", vesafb or the like before?). Then when logging in Gnome for the first time, I got another error saying more or less "cannot use all the fancy graphic stuff because you're not using the right drivers" (I'm rephrasing, you can guess...). What I'm concluding from this is that even with the working 2.6 kernel, somehow nouveau wasn't properly working in X. Installing the nvidia module didn't work as I have the DKMS issue where I can only build the 3.1 module (so I cannot test the nvidia module with the 2.6 kernel). Now, this was about X, so I didn't mention it in my first message, because it could be caused by something else (for example a problem with the xserver-xorg-video packages, not with the kernel). But I'm just saying that it might be that even the 2.6 kernel isn't so happy with nouveau and my card... > Comparing dmesg for both boots may show > differences. Look for 'drm' and 'nouveau'. Post both if you so wish. Yep, will do that tonight. Why drm, btw? I did notice that this was associated with nouveau in a number of messages, but is there a specific module for it? If yes, would blacklist/uninstall nouveau be enough or should I also try to do something about this drm stuff? > This dead keyboard: does it not respond to CTRL-ALT-DEL? No. Only NumLock seems to have a visible effect (the led switches on/off). Any other combination I tried does nothing. I didn't try the magic SysRq combinations, mostly because I don't know them, but also because I don't remember if they are supposed to be activated in the standard Debian kernels... The system does seem to properly respond to a hard-reset (i.e. by pressing the reset button on the computer case), because at the next boot it doesn't complain of badly unmounted file system (which it does if I turn off the power by pressing the "on" button for 5 s.). But that doesn't bring any more information than knowing that I can remotely login. The machine seems alive and well, excepted for the display/keyboard. > And is the final screen really blank? In the past day or so Wheezy > installs a getty which clears the screen before displaying a login > prompt. That's a long shot because I cannot see you missing it and > you were very detailed in describing your observations. There is definitely no login prompt, nor anything bigger than a single character. There may be a cursor in the top-left corner (and that would indicate that the graphic is not totally botched...), but I'm 99.999...% sure that there isn't (I'm not saying 100% because I'm not sitting in from of the machine right now, but if pushed to it I would swear there was absolutely nothing). -- Rémi Moyen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/caobzh+mr_gbqbfeo9mytwe55dz8n84dgsntfgxd6_i0nmrk...@mail.gmail.com
