[feisty] X Display in Power-Saving mode on Startup, LiveCD only

[Stephen Gornick]

On startup I need to move my mouse or press a key to get the display to come back. It is like it goes into power-saving mode seconds after initializing the X display, as I get X for the mouse int he center of the display just before when I would expect the beige background to appear, and then the monitor stops receiving a video signal.

Steps to reproduce:
1.) Power up and boot Feisty-Herd3 LiveCD.
Wait several minutes to finish boot, giving at least 30 seconds after there is no more drive activitity.

[Display will be blank. On my CRT the power light turns amber indicating there is no video signal.]

3.) Move mouse or press any key
Gnome Desktop appears.

The only things that might offer a clue:
  If I Alt-F1 I see
   agpgart: Aperture conflicts with PCI mapping
   bog1_init failed: setting screen sze: Cannot allocate memory
   screen init failed

   Then, at bottom of screen:
   kernel alive
   kernel direct mapping tables up to 100000000 @ 8000 - d000
However I've discovered on subsequent boots that those appear well before X is started.

I doubt this is related but the only other anomoly is that there is a "Crash report detected" notifier on the system tray, which then says "Add/Remove failed", and I can then submit a crash report on gnome-app-install.

Version info:
  Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty (Herd-3 release) x86_64 (AMD64)

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Thanks for your bug report. Could you add the output of 'lspci -vvn' and 'dmidecode' to it?

[Stephen Gornick (sgornick)]

I originally reported the error for Ubuntu Feisty-Herd3 x86_64 (AMD64) but I get the same results on a separate machine running Ubuntu Feisty-Herd3 i386 (albeit w/ the same CRT), so the i386 machine is the one that the lspci and dmidecode listings that I attached to this bug report are from.

[Stephen Gornick (sgornick)]

Realized that I should have used sudo for the lspci -vvn also as it shows "access denied" on some devices if I don't.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

What brand and model of CRT do you have? Are you directly connected to it or do you use a KVM?

[Stephen Gornick (sgornick)]

It must be something related to my monitor as when I plugged in my NEC Multisync XV17+, the problem no longer occurs.

The monitor that experiences this problem is my Envision EN-910 19" VGA monitor, (FCC Id ARSCM990L).

I have the keyboard, mouse and VGA connected directly to the PC.

I can confirm this behavior does not exist in Ubuntu 6.10, Edgy (i386) -- so it is something that I am first experiencing in Feisty.

It is not really an issue for me, I know just to move the mouse to get the display back, but I wanted to get the problem logged in case anyone else is experiencing similar results.

[Stephen Gornick (sgornick)]

Update: I installed Feisty Herd-3 and ran the update manager -- and this problem did not persist. Thus I can only confirm this behavior when using booting off of the Feisty Herd-3 LiveCD.

[Stephen Gornick (sgornick)]

Behavior persists in Feisty Herd4 LiveCD.

Additionally, I am now getting the same behavior on different hardware as well -- my HP zx5078CL (zx5000 series) laptop. This is occuring with the laptop's LCD display.

Attaching lspci and dmidcode of laptop

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

I can confirm this behavior both during LiveCD startup and after the initial bootup after installation. This is with Sony monitors on x86 with Herd-4.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Btw, this is a desktop system with two LCD monitors. lspci attached.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Stephen, are you still able to reliably recreate this bug? If so, could you attach your /etc/X11/xorg.conf and /var/log/Xorg.0.log files. Output from `xset q` might also be interesting. What is your graphics card and what driver are you using? My system is using an ati radeon card.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

According to this, your laptop is probably using an ATI radeon 9200:
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c00059853&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=&product=389767

Looking through the X radeon/dpms bugs on freedesktop.org, it seems there are lots of reports of blanking issues on startup, however none exactly match our issue.

I've noticed that after letting synaptic update everything, I'm no longer able to reproduce the bug (even with the LiveCD, which is odd).

[Stephen Gornick (sgornick)]

Problem appears to have been resolved in Feisty Herd-5.

[John Doe (johndoedoejohn)]

I encountered this issue back in Feisty Herd 4 but am no longer having the issue in Feisty Herd 5.

[Vinko (josefernandotolentino)]

I´d install ubuntu 6.10 64bits, but after upgrade to 7.04 get the message:

kernel alive
kernel direct mapping tables

and X dont starts.

I have no problem with live CD, my environment is production.

Thanks.

[Stephen Gornick (sgornick)]

Vinko,

When I filed this bug I was reporting that during XOrg startup some monitors would get put into power-saving mode immediately during startup. Moving the mouse or pressing any key would cause the monitor to come out of power-saving mode and resume normally. The bug was marked "fix released" and I've not seen this problem recur since even before Feisty Beta came out.

It appears that you are reporting that xorg doesn't start at all after upgrade -- which sounds like a different problem, and would be something that you would want to file a new bug report for if the problem hasn't already been reported.

If this helps you, the "kernel alive" and "kernel direct mapping tables" are normal messages during startup on my 64-bit system with Ubuntu 7.04 Desktop AMD64 (release) (they are displayed in pseudo terminal 1, accessed with Ctrl-Alt-F1).