[arch-general] Blanks screen after boot

[Philipp Überbacher]

Excerpts from Joe(theWordy)Philbrook's message of 2010-07-09 04:17:22 +0200:
> 
> It would appear that on Jul 8, Philipp did say:
> 
> > Hey,
> > I have this problem since a while but it got a lot worse with the last
> > two kernel versions. Now there's an about 50/50 chance to see the user
> > login or simply not see it. I don't have any login manager set up, so
> > after boot there's simply the user login and after that I issue startx.
> > It all works just fine,even if I can't see a thing, and once I issued
> > startx everything goes back to normal, the screen isn't blank anymore.
> > 
> > The machine has an Intel chipset, and I guess it's related to that
> > and/or KMS, but that's as far as my guess goes.
> > 
> > Maybe one of you knows something about that kind of issue?
> 
> Don't know for sure but it sounds a little like the problem I just had with
> my video driver... And my problem was definitely related to KMS...
> 
> Do you by chance have an Nvidia graphics card??? 
> 
> In my case I have a new/used (new to me) PC with on board Nvidia. It's my
> first Nvidia and I was caught by surprise when the open source driver
> didn't work for me. And since it's designed for KMS it was being deployed
> before I'd even installed xorg... This put me in a blank screen where if I
> carefully typed the keystrokes I could log in to a console and issue
> commands. But I couldn't see anything. I have no idea what this would do to
> the X session you would initialize via startx, But as far as the console
> mode part goes it was suggested that if I used the kernel option
> "nomodeset" when I booted, I might get a more usable console session.
> And for me it worked long enough to find out that I really needed the
> proprietary nvidia driver. You can see more details of my experience by
> reading the thread I started on Jul 4th 2010 with the subject line of:
> 
> screen goes blank on reboot after 1st pacman Su of new install!!!???
> 
> Hmmnnn I just noticed that I said "pacman Su" on that subject line rather
> than "pacman -Su"... Just goes to show that my brain is less than perfect.
> 
> Hope this is of some help anyway.

Thanks Joe, I saw that thread but didn't read it entirely. I have an
onboard intel chip, KMS is working since quite a while, so it might just
be a regression.

I searched around for a bit and even found something on the arch wiki
that might be related, but it lacks any reference to an upstream bug:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Intel#KMS_.28Kernel_Mode_Setting.29
Disabling KMS seems to be no option for intel chips anymore.

Further search suggests that it might be ACPI related. One ACPI bug I
reported was fixed, I can control my backlight with the function keys
now, so maybe I should report this one as well.
-- 
Regards,
Philipp

--
"Wir stehen selbst enttäuscht und sehn betroffen / Den Vorhang zu und alle Fragen offen." Bertolt Brecht, Der gute Mensch von Sezuan