Ubuntu 9.04 gives black screen after splash, remote login shows hung/unkillable gdm instance

[jose tomas]

This is an issue that was happening under a fresh Ubuntu 8.10 install, and it has continued to happen since a recent upgrade to 9.04. I'm opening this bug to help diagnose this issue and possibly develop both a workaround and a fix.

The machine in question is an eMachines T2824, and I'm using the built-in graphics system that's part of the motherboard. 'lspci' reports it is an "Intel Corporation 8245G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 01)", with subsystem "Intel Corporation Device 5352".

The problem that I am seeing is that, on a fair percentage of boots (around 40-50%), the machine appears to hang with a black screen immediately after the splash screen progress bar fills up. This happens before the background color is changed, the mouse cursor appears, or gdm comes up. The machine appears completely unresponsive at this point, and I cannot access alternate terminals via CTRL-ALT-# as might be expected.

In order to help diagnose the problem, I have set up ssh-server so that I can remotely log into the machine while it is "hung". Remote login works perfectly normally when the screen is black, and inspecting the output of 'ps aux' shows two instances of /usr/sbin/gdm being executed.

Attempts to restart gdm with 'sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart' do not work. At least one instance of gdm seems to be unresponsive to commands:
 - 'sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop'
 - 'sudo kill <PID of instance>'
 - 'sudo kill -9 <PID of instance>'

In addition, remotely executing 'sudo shutdown -r now' fails to shut down the machine, and it must be powered off completely to try to restart.

Some items to note:

1) The hang seemed to be avoided every time I accessed the GRUB menu and overrode the 'quiet' and 'splash' options from the default boot menu entry, then booted. However, making the change permanent by adjusting /boot/grub/menu.lst has still resulted in at least one hang on a cold start.

2) The hang also seemed to be avoided every time I accessed an alternate terminal during the splash screen. In these cases, the display switches to gdm when it is initialized, as would be expected.

3) I'm not positive that gdm is the ultimate culprit here, but I am filing this bug against gdm because that is the program that appears unresponsive.

4) This issue is not limited to cold boots. I have seen the same thing happen on warm restarts as well, and can be reliably reproduced by executing 'sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart' a few times successively.

I'm not an expert, but I can certainly follow directions to gather more information about this problem. Please let me know what additional information you would like to help diagnose this issue.

gdm version = 2.20.10-0ubuntu2
lsb_release -rd = Ubuntu 9.04

[Sérgio Faria (sergio91pt)]

Thank you for reporting this bug to Ubuntu. Ubuntu 9.04 reached EOL on October 23, 2010.
Please see this document for currently supported Ubuntu releases:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

Please upgrade to a supported release, preferably Ubuntu 11.04 and check if the issue still occurs.
Please feel free to report any other bugs you may find.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to New. Thanks again!.