[i915] X start crashes i915GM LVDS graphics

[Jan-Marek Glogowski]

After upgrading from Hardy to Intrepid X stopped working for me.

The screen flickers two times and starts to show a RGBWB slideshow, i.e. the whole screen turns red, green, blue, white, black, ... and changes every second. X is running fine, as I can switch to console and press Ctrl+Alt+Del to reboot. The display just continues with the slideshow, so I have no visual feedback at all.

Booting with an older custom kernel, which was working with Hardy into "init=/bin/bash" and starting X via startx results in the same error.

The graphics kind of work, if I set ForceEnablePipeA, except that the whole screen flickers every few seconds, and the Xorg log is flooded with data, probably because teh driver tries to find connected devices on VGA and TV. Errors are:

(EE) intel(0): tried to update DSPARB with both planes enabled!
(EE) intel(0): underrun on pipe B! <== this is the LVDS

The vesa driver is working fine.

I also tried an older 2.3.2 ubuntu package, which was used with 1.4.x, recompiled against 1.5 Xorg, which fails with the same symptoms. Next I tried patched hardy driver sources - failed too.
The only working version for me is the driver compiled from the vanilla 2.2.1 sources, where I don't need the "ForceEnablePipeA" option, but which also fills my Xorg.0.log with messages.

[Jan-Marek Glogowski (jmglogow)]

It's not really working as good as I thought. The 10 second connections polling process freezes the graphics about 1/2 second per poll, which makes watching video very skippy. The sound (pulseaudio) is fine during the freeze.

[Manuel Siggen (manuel-siggen)]

I've got a very similar problem with a Thinkpad X40 laptop with Kubuntu Intrepid : upon login, the screen would flicker 2-3 times, blank out completely and eventually go back to the kdm greeter.

I switched to a console, and tried to startx which gave me the attached logfile (x_crash.log).

I finally worked-around the problem by disabling the composite extension in xorg.conf :

Section "Extensions"
        Option "Composite" "false"
EndSection

[Jan-Marek Glogowski (jmglogow)]

After some more reboots it seems that the 2.2.1 driver doesn't work reliable without ForceEnablePipeA. It seems it was just luck that it worked a few times consecutively. The log is still slowly filling up and I don't have any EE entries.

[imachine (m-jedrasik)]

I have the same issue.

I suffered from https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bug/127101

so I enabled ForceEnablePipeA, however, that makes my Xorg.0.log spew:

(EE) intel(0): underrun on pipe B!
(EE) intel(0): tried to update DSPARB with both planes enabled!
(II) intel(0): I2C device "LVDSDDC_C:ddc2" resigered at address 0xA0.
(II) intel(0): I2C device "LVDSDDC_C:ddc2" removed

continuosly.

Without the ForceEnablePipeA however, whenever I logout or shutdown, I remain with a black screen, and irresponsive machine. All that can be done then is just hard-poweroff.

Which is not something I want to do.

The errors don't really bother me much, except for the fact that with them about, I can't set the brightness properly.

It all worked flawless on 8.04.1 and i810 driver.

Oh, and me too, I'm on IBM ThinkPad X40.

[imachine (m-jedrasik)]

Another fix you can try, instead of the PipeA stuff, is blacklisting 'video' module and adding nmi_watchdog=0 to grub's menu.lst.

http://ni.imasters.pl/content/ubuntu-710-oraz-804-i-problem-z-zamrażaniem-ekranu

I've tried that now, and it seems it takes care of the issue with black screen and irresponsive machine when reboot/shutdown, and also allows me to use my brightness up/down keys on my X40.

So a win-win situation! ;)

[imachine (m-jedrasik)]

The previous "fix" unfortunately does not work... hwoever, after removing acpi_sleep=s3 from the bios options, and blacklisting video, with nothing else, it seems to work fairly well.

ThinkPad X40 i85x.

[Jouni Mettala (jouni-mettala)]

Thanks for reporting this bug and any supporting documentation. Since this bug has enough information provided for a developer to begin work, I'm going to mark it as confirmed and let them handle it from here. Thanks for taking the time to make Ubuntu better!

[imachine (m-jedrasik)]

Yeah, the only downside to this "solution" is that before the first sleep, the power manager seems a little laggy, whenever I set brightness up/down. Then after I suspend the notebook, it works just fine like it's supposed to.

That however could be solved by passing a proper thinkpad_acpi option to the module.

I'll look into this later.

It's minor anyway, compared to how the notebook would hang on X ending during say shutdown :)

[Jan-Marek Glogowski (jmglogow)]

This is not a Thinkpad-only problem - I'm using a Medion SIM 2100 / MD 95600, which is actually a rebranded MSI S260.

[Steve Beattie (sbeattie)]

This bug was reported in the Intrepid development cycle; removing regression-potential and marking as regression-release.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

[This is an automatic notice.]

We'd like to forward your bug upstream, however upstream requires
that you first test it against their newer driver code.

To save you the effort of building the driver from source, we've built
packages for the driver and its new dependencies.

So you have a couple options:

 1. Download and test .debs for intrepid, from:
     https://edge.launchpad.net/~intel-gfx-testing/+archive

 -or-

 2. Download and test the Jaunty alpha-2 (or newer) Live CD,
     (which includes a beta of the new xserver 1.6 as well).
     See http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/9.04/ for ISOs

Thanks ahead of time! You can simply reply to this email to report your
findings.

P.S., if you wish to forward your bug upstream yourself, please follow
these directions to do so:
  http://intellinuxgraphics.org/how_to_report_bug.html

[Manuel Siggen (manuel-siggen)]

Hello,

I installed the xserver-xorg-video-intel package above and I could start KDE 4.1 with the composite effect enabled. So it works! Thanks a lot.

For the record, my laptop is a Thinkpad X40 with 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (see attached lsmod.txt).

Let me know if you need more info.

[Manuel Siggen (manuel-siggen)]

Actually, lspci may be of some use also :-)

[imachine (m-jedrasik)]

My X40 works fine on Ubuntu 8.10 now too.

So can't complain ! :-)

I have backports and proposed enabled, so I don't know how it is nowadays if you don't have those repos on.

But I think it got fixed a while ago already.

Cheers!

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Thanks; closing as fixed in hardy since we have that version of the package there now.