[arch-general] Persistent black screen of death issues with radeon graphics

[Robbie Smith]

On Wed, 2014-11-26 at 15:33 +0100, LoneVVolf wrote:

> > On 26-11-14 12:00, Robbie Smith wrote:
>  > 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.
>  Robbie Smith,
>  
>  This sounds a bit like  a problem a friend of mine had with a HP 
>  Pavillion DV7 .
>  I assume you have an amd APU + discrete videocard combination ?
>  (lspci -k   output would help).
>  
>  some questions / comments :
>  
>  are you using latest bios/Uefi firmware ?
>  
>  Are you sure catalyst was removed completely ?
>  
>  the entire dmesg output from a good and bad boot to console would
> also help.
>  By comparing them we might find clues about the cause of your
> problems.
>  
>  Lone_Wolf

The laptop has the APU + discrete videocard setup. 

The laptop came with Windows 7 and the BIOS is some funky not-UEFI thing
that has a UEFI application loader. It feels like a hack that HP have
come up with to coerce Windows to boot on a UEFI system with MBR disks,
or something. The latest update to it came out six months before I
bought the laptop, so I'm pretty sure it is the latest firmware.

I did a fresh reinstall about a month ago, and went straight to the
open-source drivers because I'd finally gotten them working. Catalyst
was never installed this time around.

The outputs from dmesg and lspci can both be found here:
https://gist.github.com/zoqaeski/c2ac50a1fc3c97614e66

The dmesg is from a "good" boot, but it still has that warning about no
connectors reported with modes. 

Robbie

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