Comment 5 for bug 502838

So I watched it more closely now, and I think you are right: the KMS race might well be a red herring. Sometimes I do see the big text console appear with the 25 "ureadahead-other terminated with status 4" messages before gdm/X start up, so KMS was ready at that time. I suppose the broken text terminals ("frequency not supported") are due to the vesa driver then?

When such a failure occurs, I don't have a /var/log/Xorg.0.log, just a (rather uninteresting) Xorg.failsafe.log with VESA stuff. dmesg has no errors either and just shows that DRM is up and the screen modes are set properly.

/var/log/gdm/:0.log shows that KMS/DRM indeed worked:

[ 3.243116] (II) intel(0): Output DVI1 using initial mode 1280x1024
[ 3.292017] (II) intel(0): [DRI2] Setup complete
[ 3.292039] (**) intel(0): Kernel mode setting active, disabling FBC.

There is no error message in the end, just

[ 36.783732] (II) intel(0): Modeline "1280x1024"x0.0 108.00 1280 1328 1440 1688 1024 1025 1028 1066 +hsync +vsync (64.0 kHz)
[ 119.962615] (II) "Video Bus": Close
[ 120.012305] (II) "Video Bus": Close
[ 120.052313] (II) "Power Button": Close
[ 120.082316] (II) "Sleep Button": Close
[ 120.132396] (II) "HID 05f3:0007": Close
[ 120.192504] (II) "HID 05f3:0007": Close
[ 120.262437] (II) "Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse": Close
[ 120.312431] (II) "AT Translated Set 2 keyboard": Close
[ 120.372361] (II) "DualPoint Stick": Close
[ 120.522372] (II) "Dell WMI hotkeys": Close
[ 120.572430] (II) "Macintosh mouse button emulation": Close
 ddxSigGiveUp: Closing log

Given the timestamps that's a normal shutdown; I played a bit with the failsafe options, so two minutes sounds realistic. What I wonder about is why the server with the intel driver has been up for so long, because what I saw and used was definitively the VESA driver.

Nothing else interesting in :0-{slave,greeter}.log unfortunately. I'll try an strace and some more debugging.