I have two ATI Radeon graphics cards. I'm running linux with a 3.10.17
kernel. One graphics card is the MSI R5450, which has the HD5450
graphics processor. The other card is a Diamond HD6450 with the HD6450
processor. I boot with the nouveau driver installed. When I boot with
the MSI card everything is normal. The screen shows the progress of the
boot process, the screen blacks out when nouveau is installed and then
switches to tiny letters and everything is fine. If I start X I get a
good X display and when I shut it down I get the good console display as
previously.

When I boot with the Diamond card the boot process proceeds as before,
but after the screen blanks out and the nouveau driver is installed the
screen is filled with essentially random pixels under which there is the
faint suggestion that you can see actual text. I can log in and start
X. Under X the screen is a complete wash of random pixels, but I can
shut X down with control-alt-backspace, at which point the screen blacks
out for several seconds and then normal console text appears.
Thereafter I can start and stop X and get normal console displays as
often as I wish.

In other words, after starting and shutting down X the card behaves
perfectly normally. It's as if some setting of the card by the initial
load of nouveau is improper and is only corrected when X shuts down back
to a console.

Any suggestions about making this card behave normally?

--
Cheers, Bev
-----------------------------------------
There's something wrong with my keyboard.
Whenever I type x I get x.

comp.os.linux.x added.

The Real Bev wrote:
I have two ATI Radeon graphics cards. I'm running linux with a
3.10.17 kernel. One graphics card is the MSI R5450, which has the
HD5450 graphics processor. The other card is a Diamond HD6450 with
the HD6450 processor. I boot with the nouveau driver installed.

I didn't know what noveau was, but it appears to be a driver for nVidia
graphics cards, per http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki . So I am a
little bit confused about how you are using it with ATI/AMD graphics
cards. Do you also have an nVidia card in this machine?

When I boot with the MSI card everything is normal. The screen shows
the progress of the boot process, the screen blacks out when nouveau
is installed and then switches to tiny letters and everything is
fine. If I start X I get a good X display and when I shut it down I
get the good console display as previously.

You might boot with the MSI card and capture the dmesg output (kernel
messages) at different points. It might also be interesting to get
the list of kernel modules that are loaded. Grab a copy of the X log
too - it will probably be named /var/log/Xorg.0.log or something close.

# boot up into text mode here, then
dmesg msi-before-x.txt
lsmod msi-modules.txt
# start X
# start an xterm, then
dmesg msi-in-x.txt
# shut down X, then
dmesg msi-after-x.txt
cp /var/log/Xorg.0.log msi-xorg.txt

When I boot with the Diamond card the boot process proceeds as before,
but after the screen blanks out and the nouveau driver is installed
the screen is filled with essentially random pixels under which there
is the faint suggestion that you can see actual text. I can log in
and start X. Under X the screen is a complete wash of random pixels,
but I can shut X down with control-alt-backspace, at which point the
screen blacks out for several seconds and then normal console text
appears. Thereafter I can start and stop X and get normal console
displays as often as I wish.

Can you switch to a text console while X is running? (control-alt-F1)

# boot up into text mode here
# log in blind
dmesg diamond-before-x.txt
lsmod diamond-modules.txt
# start X
# switch to text console, or ssh in from another machine, then
dmesg diamond-in-x.txt
# shut down X, then
dmesg diamond-after-x.txt
cp /var/log/Xorg.0.log diamond-xorg.txt
# possibly start X again and then
dmesg diamond-in-x-again.txt
cp /var/log/Xorg.0.log diamond-xorg-again.txt

Then... compare all your dmesg outputs. There may be some warning or
information message that points to the problem. It may also be
interesting to compare which modules are loaded with the different
cards. Compare both of the X logs for the Diamond card to see if there
are different messages at startup.

X drivers are getting better and better at this all the time, but one
common case (IMHO) of a bad picture is that the driver isn't auto-
detecting something correctly. If your video card driver reports
anything in dmesg or the X log when it starts, compare that to the known
specs of your video card to see if they match. There may be a command-
line option to the video card driver to force (for example) a certain
memory size or GPU type.

You already know about control-alt-backspace; when playing X games it
can also sometimes be helpful to ssh into the X machine from another
machine, so you can shut things down or restart if you go blind.

It may also be helpful to boot your machine with a live CD (Knoppix,
SystemRescueCD, or one from your favorite distribution) to see if it
behaves any differently. The live CD will almost certainly have
different versions of the video drivers than what you have, which can
help tell you if your problem is fixed in a newer driver, or maybe that
it used to work and then broke.

Before X even starts, a lot of distributions try to load a custom VGA
font in text mode to make the console look "better". Perhaps this
process is screwing up for some reason on your Diamond card. If you
can disable this custom font loading, it may help. I would look in
/etc/init.d and /etc/rc[0-6S].d to figure this out, but I know that
some distributions have reinvented the startup wheel and you'd need to
look elsewhere.

In other words, after starting and shutting down X the card behaves
perfectly normally. It's as if some setting of the card by the
initial load of nouveau is improper and is only corrected when X shuts
down back to a console.

Bugs like this have existed before. On the way, way back, for a few
video cards, sometimes you had to boot to DOS or Windows first to get
the card set up, and then reboot into Linux. You probably don't need
to start carving out space for a DOS partition, though.

Matt Roberds

On 04/15/2014 04:25 PM, wrote:

comp.os.linux.x added.

The Real Bev wrote:
I have two ATI Radeon graphics cards. I'm running linux with a
3.10.17 kernel. One graphics card is the MSI R5450, which has the
HD5450 graphics processor. The other card is a Diamond HD6450 with
the HD6450 processor. I boot with the nouveau driver installed.

I didn't know what noveau was, but it appears to be a driver for nVidia
graphics cards, per http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki . So I am a
little bit confused about how you are using it with ATI/AMD graphics
cards. Do you also have an nVidia card in this machine?

When I boot with the MSI card everything is normal. The screen shows
the progress of the boot process, the screen blacks out when nouveau
is installed and then switches to tiny letters and everything is
fine. If I start X I get a good X display and when I shut it down I
get the good console display as previously.

You might boot with the MSI card and capture the dmesg output (kernel
messages) at different points. It might also be interesting to get
the list of kernel modules that are loaded. Grab a copy of the X log
too - it will probably be named /var/log/Xorg.0.log or something close.

# boot up into text mode here, then
dmesg msi-before-x.txt
lsmod msi-modules.txt
# start X
# start an xterm, then
dmesg msi-in-x.txt
# shut down X, then
dmesg msi-after-x.txt
cp /var/log/Xorg.0.log msi-xorg.txt

When I boot with the Diamond card the boot process proceeds as before,
but after the screen blanks out and the nouveau driver is installed
the screen is filled with essentially random pixels under which there
is the faint suggestion that you can see actual text. I can log in
and start X. Under X the screen is a complete wash of random pixels,
but I can shut X down with control-alt-backspace, at which point the
screen blacks out for several seconds and then normal console text
appears. Thereafter I can start and stop X and get normal console
displays as often as I wish.

Can you switch to a text console while X is running? (control-alt-F1)

# boot up into text mode here
# log in blind
dmesg diamond-before-x.txt
lsmod diamond-modules.txt
# start X
# switch to text console, or ssh in from another machine, then
dmesg diamond-in-x.txt
# shut down X, then
dmesg diamond-after-x.txt
cp /var/log/Xorg.0.log diamond-xorg.txt
# possibly start X again and then
dmesg diamond-in-x-again.txt
cp /var/log/Xorg.0.log diamond-xorg-again.txt

Then... compare all your dmesg outputs. There may be some warning or
information message that points to the problem. It may also be
interesting to compare which modules are loaded with the different
cards. Compare both of the X logs for the Diamond card to see if there
are different messages at startup.

X drivers are getting better and better at this all the time, but one
common case (IMHO) of a bad picture is that the driver isn't auto-
detecting something correctly. If your video card driver reports
anything in dmesg or the X log when it starts, compare that to the known
specs of your video card to see if they match. There may be a command-
line option to the video card driver to force (for example) a certain
memory size or GPU type.

You already know about control-alt-backspace; when playing X games it
can also sometimes be helpful to ssh into the X machine from another
machine, so you can shut things down or restart if you go blind.

It may also be helpful to boot your machine with a live CD (Knoppix,
SystemRescueCD, or one from your favorite distribution) to see if it
behaves any differently. The live CD will almost certainly have
different versions of the video drivers than what you have, which can
help tell you if your problem is fixed in a newer driver, or maybe that
it used to work and then broke.

Before X even starts, a lot of distributions try to load a custom VGA
font in text mode to make the console look "better". Perhaps this
process is screwing up for some reason on your Diamond card. If you
can disable this custom font loading, it may help. I would look in
/etc/init.d and /etc/rc[0-6S].d to figure this out, but I know that
some distributions have reinvented the startup wheel and you'd need to
look elsewhere.

In other words, after starting and shutting down X the card behaves
perfectly normally. It's as if some setting of the card by the
initial load of nouveau is improper and is only corrected when X shuts
down back to a console.

Bugs like this have existed before. On the way, way back, for a few
video cards, sometimes you had to boot to DOS or Windows first to get
the card set up, and then reboot into Linux. You probably don't need
to start carving out space for a DOS partition, though.

I'm sorry, I should have said Radeon instead of nouveau. It's
definitely the Radeon driver. Thanks for your help.

I tried to follow your suggestions as closely as I can, but it's very
difficult to switch the cards in and out of the machine to run these
tests. As nearly as I can see there is no change to the modules loaded
for the two graphics cards, either at the original boot into the
console, before starting X or after shutting X down.

The dmesg lines for the two cards are substantially different. For the
card that does not come up readable I don't see any error message,
except for this possibility: "Radeon 0000:01:00.0: registered panic
notifier." That's the only thing that looks like it doesn't belong.

When I start X there are numerous repeated sequences of a ~40-line block
that begins with 'GPU lockup CP stall for more than 10000 ms'. In the
last block it ultimately says 'GPU reset succeeded trying to resume'.
There are no lines like this when X starts normally with the working
graphics card.

I tried the card in another machine with an AMD processor and a
different motherboard, but running the same linux kernel. It didn't
work -- I couldn't ever get it to display readable text, and trying to
start x resulted in nothing at all.

I'm really hoping that somebody else has run into this problem -- and
solved it. The card really isn't worth any more effort than we've
already put into it. In its defense, it doesn't say 'linux compatible'
on the box.

Thanks again for your suggestions.


--
Cheers, Bev
================================================== ==================================
"The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other
people's money."

On Tue, 15 Apr 2014 15:04:40 -0700, The Real Bev wrote:

I have two ATI Radeon graphics cards. I'm running linux with a 3.10.17
kernel. One graphics card is the MSI R5450, which has the HD5450
graphics processor. The other card is a Diamond HD6450 with the HD6450
processor. I boot with the nouveau driver installed. When I boot with
the MSI card everything is normal. The screen shows the progress of the
boot process, the screen blacks out when nouveau is installed and then
switches to tiny letters and everything is fine. If I start X I get a
good X display and when I shut it down I get the good console display as
previously.

When I boot with the Diamond card the boot process proceeds as before,
but after the screen blanks out and the nouveau driver is installed the
screen is filled with essentially random pixels under which there is the
faint suggestion that you can see actual text. I can log in and start
X. Under X the screen is a complete wash of random pixels, but I can
shut X down with control-alt-backspace, at which point the screen blacks
out for several seconds and then normal console text appears. Thereafter
I can start and stop X and get normal console displays as often as I
wish.

In other words, after starting and shutting down X the card behaves
perfectly normally. It's as if some setting of the card by the initial
load of nouveau is improper and is only corrected when X shuts down back
to a console.

Any suggestions about making this card behave normally?

mint 15 light weight desktop, not petra 16

In sci.electronics.repair The Real Bev wrote:
I'm sorry, I should have said Radeon instead of nouveau. It's
definitely the Radeon driver.

OK.

The dmesg lines for the two cards are substantially different. For
the card that does not come up readable I don't see any error message,
except for this possibility: "Radeon 0000:01:00.0: registered panic
notifier." That's the only thing that looks like it doesn't belong.

I don't know exactly what that is, but it doesn't *sound* like a big
deal.

When I start X there are numerous repeated sequences of a ~40-line
block that begins with 'GPU lockup CP stall for more than 10000 ms'.
In the last block it ultimately says 'GPU reset succeeded trying to
resume'. There are no lines like this when X starts normally with
the working graphics card.

Hey... you found a difference! I don't know how to *fix* that
particular error, but I think it is a symptom of your problem.

I'm really hoping that somebody else has run into this problem -- and
solved it.

The X.org page for the Radeon driver
http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/#index9h2
says bugs can be filed at http://bugs.freedesktop.org/ . It might be
worth a search there to see if anyone else has reported it. If not,
report it yourself.

The X.org page also lists the kernel module parameters at
http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/#index4h2
and shows how to check the current values. Perhaps changing one of
those will help, although it may mean a lot of rebooting. (I'm not
sure if you can remove and reinsert the radeon module when you're only
running on a text console, or not.)

In its defense, it doesn't say 'linux compatible' on the box.

I usually ignore that, because it often means "we tested it on one
specific 4-year-old distro with propietary drivers and it kind of
worked". Googling is a much better plan, but it does kind of fall down
with brand new hardware.

Matt Roberds

In article , says...
I have two ATI Radeon graphics cards. I'm running linux with a 3.10.17
kernel. One graphics card is the MSI R5450, which has the HD5450
graphics processor. The other card is a Diamond HD6450 with the HD6450
processor. I boot with the nouveau driver installed. When I boot with
the MSI card everything is normal. The screen shows the progress of the
boot process, the screen blacks out when nouveau is installed and then
switches to tiny letters and everything is fine. If I start X I get a
good X display and when I shut it down I get the good console display as
previously.

When I boot with the Diamond card the boot process proceeds as before,
but after the screen blanks out and the nouveau driver is installed the
screen is filled with essentially random pixels under which there is the
faint suggestion that you can see actual text. I can log in and start
X. Under X the screen is a complete wash of random pixels, but I can
shut X down with control-alt-backspace, at which point the screen blacks
out for several seconds and then normal console text appears.
Thereafter I can start and stop X and get normal console displays as
often as I wish.

In other words, after starting and shutting down X the card behaves
perfectly normally. It's as if some setting of the card by the initial
load of nouveau is improper and is only corrected when X shuts down back
to a console.

Any suggestions about making this card behave normally?


Reminds me of an old story about a patient telling the doctor that it
hurts when I do this...