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

[Mauro Santos]

On 26-11-2014 11:00, 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.
> 

You seem to be doing late KMS, try doing early KMS. I've had trouble
before with late KMS and ever since I started using early KMS the
problems are gone.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/kernel_mode_setting#Early_KMS_start

-- 
Mauro Santos