Help !! It's Baaack !

[mylar]

On Mon, 2007-12-17 at 10:31 -0800, Rick Stevens wrote:
> On Sun, 2007-12-16 at 06:30 -0500, mylar wrote:
> > On Fri, 2007-12-14 at 11:30 -0800, Rick Stevens wrote:
> > > On Fri, 2007-12-14 at 06:11 -0500, mylar wrote:
> > > > Hello.
> > 
> > > > 
> > > > Any ideas. Where do I start debugging this thing ? Why would it work,
> > > > then not work, intermittently like that. Its one of the strangest
> > > > problems I've had in a looooong time. 
> > > 
> > > First off, what kind of video hardware is it?  Which driver are you
> > > running?  This sounds like the driver is misinterpreting the DRI data
> > > from the monitor on warm boots.
> > > 
> > 
> > Okay, the machine is 2.8 Ghz Dell 4600 running an Intel on board video
> > adapter. The video card is an Intel 82865G Integrated Graphics
> > Controller  and the monitor is a Dell E172FP flap panel LCD display. The
> > driver is the i810 driver which is the one I was told to use and, the
> > only one which seems to work. I'm running at a screen resolution of
> > 1280x1024 which I have been using on this machine for several years. I
> > had no problem with Fedora 1, not with Fedora 7 while running the 2.6.18
> > XEN kernel. As soon as I upgraded to 2.6.20 whammo, the problem began.
> > 
> > To make things confusing (at least for me) it sometimes the display
> > comes up fine. Other times it will flicker a few times then come up
> > fine. other times it sits there like stone and does nothing till I hit
> > the big switch.
> > 
> > Oh, one other thing. It also happens on cold boots too. This morning I
> > booted the machine cold and it happened. I had to reboot to the old
> > kernel.
> > 
> > Lastly, I can find nothing in the systems logs or anywhere else that
> > might indicate where the glitch is occurring. It's strange.
> 
> I've run into a similar thing myself.  On occasion after the screen
> saver blanks the screen (this is on an nVidia with a Viewsonic display),
> the display wakes up but it's torn and unreadable.  A quick
> "CTRL-ALT-F1" followed by an "ALT-F7" (go to text console and back to
> GUI) cures it.  I've not found a permanent fix.
> 
> It seems that the DRI/DRM stuff isn't sticking so the horizontal and
> vertical refresh aren't sent properly when the screen wakes up and my
> weird key sequence above causes a reset.  This smells like something
> that should be sent to bugzilla.
> 

I may have found a temporary fix. I lowered the default screen
resolution as root and thus far it has booted up with no problems two or
three times in a row. However, when i log in and operate under X under
my regular non-root account it seems to run fine under the higher
1280x1024 screen resolution that I normally like to use.

I googled around a bit to see what I could find about this problem. it
seems that I am not alone. Others have reported similar problems. seems
something got broke between kernel updates with respect to the i810
driver. I hate it when updates break stuff that has previously worked
but that's the nature of the beast.

I never submitted a bug report to bugzilla. Is that a relatively
painless process ?  It would be great if this problem could be patched
soon.

John / mylar
 




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