[arch-general] Display issues with Linux 3.1

[Taylor Hedberg]

hollunder at lavabit.com, Sat 2011-11-12 @ 22:42:57-0500:
> I'm rather sure this is a new intel driver bug, I have the exact same
> issue. My laptops chipset is slightly newer:
> 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960
> Integrated Graphics Controller (primary) (rev 03)
> 00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960
> Integrated Graphics Controller (secondary) (rev 03)

I finally figured out a fix for the blank screen during boot issue. I
had not added i915 to the MODULES list in my mkinitcpio.conf, because
later in the boot process, udev would kick in and load the driver
automatically. But apparently this can cause a sort of race condition,
where if modules happen to be loaded in a particular order by udev, this
blank screen issue can occur. Loading the driver during early userspace
avoids this problem entirely, since by the time udev starts up, the
module has already been present in the kernel for a while.

So if you don't already have i915 in MODULES, just add it and then
regenerate your initial ramdisk. This seems to have solved the problem
for me.

I was inspired by a suggestion [1] in a bug report on freedesktop.org,
which led me to this solution. The bug report is for a similar (but not
identical) issue. The user reported that building a kernel with the i915
driver statically included made his problem disappear. I tried this, and
it worked. But this has essentially the same effect as including the
module in the initial ramdisk, which is a bit easier to do. So there you
go.

[1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22674#c11
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