I am at a loss as to what the hell is going on with my laptop. It's a HP Pavillion with the dual AMD graphics (7520G + 7500M), and I will never again buy a laptop containing components from either manufacturer. More often than not when I boot, when the kernel tries to do modesetting the screen will just turn off. I can SSH in, so it's clearly booting up, but the only hint that anything unusual is happening in the logs is this error message:
[ 28.879834] radeon 0000:01:00.0: No connectors reported connected with modes [ 28.879842] [drm] Cannot find any crtc or sizes - going 1024x768 [ 28.881975] [drm] fb mappable at 0xE0474000 [ 28.881978] [drm] vram apper at 0xE0000000 [ 28.881980] [drm] size 3145728 [ 28.881982] [drm] fb depth is 24 [ 28.881985] [drm] pitch is 4096 [ 28.882332] radeon 0000:01:00.0: fb1: radeondrmfb frame buffer device [ 28.997034] [drm] Initialized radeon 2.40.0 20080528 for 0000:01:00.0 on minor 1
I feel like I've tried almost everything: - Upgrading and downgrading kernels (I'm currently using 3.17.1) - Various combinations of kernel boot parameters (fbcon=map:0, fbcon=map:1, radeon.modeset=1, radeon.modeset=0, etc) - Adding lines to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-radeon.conf that tell it which PCI device to map to. - Uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers I used to use catalyst because that was the only driver that worked, but as it doesn't support KMS, I couldn't use GNOME anymore, so switching back to that isn't an option. Searching for the problem doesn't seem to find anything relevant; there's a few forum posts by Ubuntu users but mostly tumbleweed. The bug tracker on freedesktop.org is awkward to navigate so I have no idea if what I'm experiencing has occurred to anyone else. Even just knowing where to go to report a bug or a more appropriate mailing list that could point me in the right direction would be helpful at this stage. The most frustrating bit is that this occurs almost at random. I could use the laptop all day at the library, no issues; turn it off (because suspend is broken on radeon), come home and no screen for what feels like a thousand reboots.