[Gamila/Giovani/Neon motherboard] ACPI error prevents drm from loading

[Jonathan Thomas]

From dmesg:
[ 0.000000] ACPI Error: A valid RSDP was not found 20090521 tbxfroot-219

It seems this ACPI error leads the acpi/video.ko driver to fail to load, which causes the drm driver to fail to load.

Original description:
I'm currently posting this using the vesa driver since -intel is too excruciatingly slow. The /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old contains the Xorg log from when I used -intel last X session.

Anyways, the symptoms while using -intel are that everything becomes excruciatingly slow while Xorg eats up all available CPU.
Looking at the log I believe this to be the cause of failure:

drmOpenDevice: node name is /dev/dri/card0
[drm] failed to load kernel module "i915"
(EE) intel(0): [drm] Failed to open DRM device for : No such file or directory
(EE) intel(0): Failed to become DRM master.

This happens on a beta live CD as well as with a fully-updated 9.10.

I believe that the DRM errors lead to the driver falling back to an extremely slow (slower than vesa) software rasterizer.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Thu Oct 8 15:43:34 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
MachineType: Hewlett-Packard PPPPPP-ABA MMMMM
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: xserver-xorg-video-intel 2:2.9.0-1ubuntu1
ProcCmdLine: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-12-generic root=UUID=f729410d-6864-4a78-9833-a9f7781fd469 ro quiet splash i915.modeset=0
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US:en
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-12.41-generic
RelatedPackageVersions:
 xserver-xorg 1:7.4+3ubuntu5
 libgl1-mesa-glx 7.6.0-1ubuntu1
 libdrm2 2.4.14-1ubuntu1
 xserver-xorg-video-intel 2:2.9.0-1ubuntu1
 xserver-xorg-video-ati 1:6.12.99+git20090825.fc74e119-0ubuntu3
SourcePackage: xserver-xorg-video-intel
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-12-generic i686
XorgConf: Error: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/etc/X11/xorg.conf'
dmi.bios.date: 05/09/2005
dmi.bios.version: 3.26
dmi.board.name: Gamila/Giovani/Neon series
dmi.board.vendor: MICRO-STAR INTERNATIONAL CO., LTD
dmi.board.version: 030
dmi.chassis.type: 3
dmi.modalias: dmi:bvn&oenixTechnologies,LTD:bvr3.26:bd05/09/2005:svnHewlett-Packard:pnPPPPPP-ABAMMMMM:pvr:rvnMICRO-STARINTERNATIONALCO.,LTD:rnGamila/Giovani/Neonseries:rvr030:cvn:ct3:cvr:
dmi.product.name: PPPPPP-ABA MMMMM
dmi.sys.vendor: Hewlett-Packard
fglrx: Not loaded
system:
 distro: Ubuntu
 architecture: i686kernel: 2.6.31-12-generic

[lspci]
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device [8086:2562] (rev 03)
     Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. Device [1462:5778]
01:0a.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: nVidia Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 440 AGP 8x] [10de:0181] (rev a4)
     Subsystem: eVga.com. Corp. Device [3842:b089]

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

Could be related to bug 442197.

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

Still an issue with xserver-xorg-video-intel 2.9.1 in lucid.

[Saint Aardvark (aardvark)]

I believe I encountered the same problem on a Dell Inspiron 1440 laptop after upgrading from Jaunty to Karmic: rendering was unbearably slow, the error messages about DRM in Xorg.0.log were the same, and the /dev/dri directory did not exist.

Upgrading the kernel to linux-image-2.6.31-16-generic made the problem go away; performance was fine, /dev/dri/card0 showed up, and Xorg.0.log showed DRI2 was enabled. Please let me know if you'd like more information; I've still got the old kernel around, so I can get debugging info if needed.

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

I think this might be a kernel issue, since it seems that the main issue here is that the i915 module isn't getting loaded:

jonathan@jonathan-desktop:~$ sudo modprobe i915
WARNING: Error inserting agpgart (/lib/modules/2.6.32-7-generic/kernel/drivers/char/agp/agpgart.ko): No such device
WARNING: Error inserting intel_agp (/lib/modules/2.6.32-7-generic/kernel/drivers/char/agp/intel-agp.ko): No such device
WARNING: Error inserting i2c_algo_bit (/lib/modules/2.6.32-7-generic/kernel/drivers/i2c/algos/i2c-algo-bit.ko): No such device
WARNING: Error inserting drm (/lib/modules/2.6.32-7-generic/kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/drm.ko): No such device
WARNING: Error inserting drm_kms_helper (/lib/modules/2.6.32-7-generic/kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/drm_kms_helper.ko): No such device
FATAL: Error inserting i915 (/lib/modules/2.6.32-7-generic/kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915.ko): No such device

[mentor (matthew-bells23)]

Looks like the module 'video' has failed to load. This is a driver for ACPI display/video bits. It will fail to load with a 'no such device' error if ACPI is disabled in the kernel, such as by passing 'acpi=off' on the kernel command line.

[mentor (matthew-bells23)]

There's a bug in module-init-tools not printing out errors properly. I have submitted a patch here: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.modules/405

[mentor (matthew-bells23)]

This is not a bug in xserver-xorg-video-intel, as the problem is only the kernel module not loading.

[mentor (matthew-bells23)]

The issue is a misconfiguration of Linux not a bug in Linux.

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

Ubuntu is providing a misconfiguration by default, then, as this affects the livecd.

[Chris Halse Rogers (raof)]

Could you please try running “sudo modprobe -vvv i915” and attaching the output, along with dmesg after running that command? There's something strange here, as the original dmesg on the bug indicates that agpgart and agpgart-intel are being loaded, but drm doesn't try to come up.

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

I'm no longer using this machine for anything, so it'd probably be best to just let this one rest.

[piernov (piernov)]

Yes this is a 12 years old bug but here is fix:
Either add "acpi_rsdp=0xf7f70 acpi=rsdt" to your kernel command line parameters
OR flash the patched BIOS at https://badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?p=1088210 for a permanent fix.