Comment 54 for bug 1364630

I too get this message in Kubuntu 14.10. I have a Lenovo laptop with Intel integrated graphics.

I actually have two Kubuntu 14.10's in different partitions on this machine. I'm writing this from what I'll call P1, which I had abandoned because the partition was too small for my needs. So I created P2, which has plenty of space. P2 was running just fine for a couple of months when it suddenly started misbehaving badly. After a reboot (to P2) I got just a black screen, though I was able to get to a virtual console with Ctl-Alt-F1 and thus get much more information about the system. When I booted P2 via a slightly different route I got the "error while reading from descriptor" message.

So I now have P1, which works but is not fully usable, and P2, which gives me a black screen. That opens up some potential ways of diagnosing the problem since I can compare the two systems. In particular, I ran dmsg in both systems and compared the two outputs to find the first significant difference. I found this sequence in P2:

[ 1.143424] [drm] Replacing VGA console driver
[ 1.143428] checking generic (e0000000 410000) vs hw (e0000000 10000000)
[ 1.143429] fb: switching to inteldrmfb from VESA VGA
[ 1.143449] Console: switching to colour dummy device 80x25

But in P1 (the correct one) the lines 428 and 429 are absent.

This probably points directly to the bug if only I knew how to interpret it. P2 was fully updated when it started misbehaving; P1 was not.