Guys, I almost had a heartattack tonight when I updated my laptop and X died. I though "oh no, here we go again -- the intel story all over again..." After update I did a clean restart and the first thing I noticed was the screen resolution changed (twice) during the boot process: (1) First few lines ~ 640x480 regular text (2) Arch console splash displayed, looked like 1024x768 ::process a [result] ::process b [result] ::process c [result] (3) The something switched again and right justified the results: ::process d [result] ::process e [result] ::process f [result] Then when Runlevel 5 was reached and X started it hung and looked like it was frying my screen (started out blackscreened and then became progressively brighter until ctrl+alt+F1 to drop to console). I killed kdm (initially using kdm3) with /etc/rc.d/kdm3 stop and confirmed all was dead with ps ax | grep kdm. Thinking it could have been a problem with kdm3 versus kdm, I tried to start kdm with /etc/rc.d/kdm start -- same result. X hung, same frying screen look ctrl+alt+F1 to drop to console. Crap! Ok, then I decided to try starting X without an xorg.conf to see if the defaults would work. /etc/rc.d/kdm start -- same result. X hung, same frying screen look ctrl+alt+F1 to drop to console. Alright, I killed everything off and tried the kde3 greeter with /etc/rc.d/kdm3 start -- Ha! It worked (I'm typing now) Whatever is going on with the modules moving into the kernel, etc. there are some very nasty unexpected consequences for users. I am glad I was able to get the kde3 greeter to start X, but I suspect that if I only had kde4 installed, I would be dead-in-the-water. (I launch kde4 from the kde3 greeter) An example of the errors.log messages I saw were: Oct 16 16:37:15 alchemy kernel: ..MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO- APIC Oct 16 16:37:15 alchemy kernel: ata1: softreset failed (device not ready) Oct 16 16:37:17 alchemy kernel: Intel AES-NI instructions are not detected. Oct 16 21:14:39 alchemy kernel: ..MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO- APIC Oct 16 21:14:39 alchemy kernel: ata1: softreset failed (device not ready) Oct 16 21:14:39 alchemy kernel: fb: conflicting fb hw usage radeondrmfb vs VESA VGA - removing generic driver Oct 16 21:14:55 alchemy kernel: [drm:radeon_cp_setparam_kms] *ERROR* invalid ioctl with kms radeon_cp_setparam_kms Oct 16 21:14:55 alchemy kernel: [drm:radeon_cp_init_kms] *ERROR* invalid ioctl with kms radeon_cp_init_kms Oct 16 21:16:31 alchemy kernel: [drm:radeon_cp_setparam_kms] *ERROR* invalid ioctl with kms radeon_cp_setparam_kms Oct 16 21:16:31 alchemy kernel: [drm:radeon_cp_init_kms] *ERROR* invalid ioctl with kms radeon_cp_init_kms Oct 16 21:16:51 alchemy kernel: [drm:radeon_cp_setparam_kms] *ERROR* invalid ioctl with kms radeon_cp_setparam_kms Oct 16 21:16:51 alchemy kernel: [drm:radeon_cp_init_kms] *ERROR* invalid ioctl with kms radeon_cp_init_kms Oct 16 21:16:56 alchemy kdm_greet[1905]: Cannot load /usr/share/apps/kdm/faces/.default.face: No such file or directory Oct 16 21:16:56 alchemy kdm: :0[1903]: Abnormal termination of greeter for display :0, code 1, signal 0 Oct 16 21:17:34 alchemy kdm_greet[1949]: Cannot load /usr/share/apps/kdm/faces/.default.face: No such file or directory Oct 16 21:17:34 alchemy kdm: :0[1947]: Abnormal termination of greeter for display :0, code 1, signal 0 So far performance is fine with the new setup. To be honest, I don't even know what driver is being used at the moment (I haven't had time to check. I thought I would get this post out in case some other radeonhd user is freaking out after update). I have captured the following information and I'm making it available to the devs if anyone is interested in what happened here. This laptop is an old Toshiba P205d (Radeon RS690M graphics card). The information I saved is: (hostname is alchemy) dmesg.alchemy.txt dmidecode.alchemy.txt errors.log everything.log kdm.log kernel.log lspci.alchemy.txt messages.log pacman.log Xorg.0.log Xorg.0.log.old Xorg.1.log Xorg.1.log.old xorg.conf All of the files are contained in a bzipped tar archive at (~126k): http://www.3111skyline.com/download/Archlinux/alchemy/alchemy.X.crash.tar.bz... Each of the files can be accessed individually at: http://www.3111skyline.com/download/Archlinux/alchemy/ Let me know if I can provide more information. -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com