Ubuntu 11.04 displays gibberish screen and becomes unresponsive

[beecheese]

Dear Ubuntu folk,

I installed Ubuntu 11.04 on an older laptop last night and it has crashed 3 times in the last 24 hours. Each time this has happed, I have been in the middle of using either Chrome or Chromium and the screen becomes unreadable and covered in lots of grey and white horizontal lines. To get things back to normal, I have to force the machine to shut down.

It's an oldish laptop (Acer TravelMate 2420 - about 6 years old) but it has been running Ubuntu 10.10 without any hiccups for 6 months. After checking the FAQ, I thought the VGA card might be relevant and after checking in the Terminal I have found out these details about the VGA card:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller (rev 03)

I installed Narwhal from a bootable CD and completely deleted anything on the machine that existed previously.

Has anyone got any suggestions of how to cope with this? Any suggestions would be much appreciated!

John

[shahmish]

A bit more info about the computer specifications would perhaps help.

[beecheese]

My laptop is an Acer Travelmate 2420 and has an Intel Celeron M chip apparently. From the terminal I have found this out:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/PM/GMS/910GML Express Processor to DRAM Controller (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 03)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 03)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 03)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 03)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 03)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev d3)
00:1e.2 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 03)
00:1e.3 Modem: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801FBM (ICH6M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 03)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) IDE Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03)
06:05.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR2413 802.11bg NIC (rev 01)
06:07.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
06:09.0 CardBus bridge: ENE Technology Inc CB1410 Cardbus Controller (rev 01)

I have no idea what most of that means! Is there any other details I can find out that might help?

I really appreciate any suggestions!

[ericthecat]

Hi,

I think I'm getting the same problem - screen goes to narrow horizontal lines, and the mouse cursor still moves, but is otherwise unresponsive. Ctrl-Alt-F1 still switches virtual terminal, and I can restart from there. My lspci looks almost identical to the original poster's (this is an oldish Sony Vaio laptop).

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/PM/GMS/910GML Express Processor to DRAM Controller (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 03)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 03)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 03)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 03)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 03)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 03)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev d3)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801FBM (ICH6M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 03)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) IDE Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03)
06:05.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCIxx21/x515 Cardbus Controller
06:05.2 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller
06:05.3 Mass storage controller: Texas Instruments PCIxx21 Integrated FlashMedia Controller
06:08.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82562EM/EX/GX - PRO/100 VM (LOM) Ethernet Controller Mobile (rev 03)
06:0b.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 2200BG [Calexico2] Network Connection (rev 05)


Just before the crash I got the following in dmesg/kern.log:

May 1 13:02:34 florence kernel: [ 202.105730] exe (1771): /proc/1771/oom_adj is deprecated, please use /proc/1771/oom_score_adj instead.
May 1 13:02:35 florence kernel: [ 203.308038] [drm:i915_hangcheck_elapsed] *ERROR* Hangcheck timer elapsed... GPU hung
May 1 13:02:35 florence kernel: [ 203.310081] [drm:i915_do_wait_request] *ERROR* i915_do_wait_request returns -11 (awaiting 22691 at 22663, next 22692)
May 1 13:02:35 florence kernel: [ 203.310481] [drm:i915_reset] *ERROR* Failed to reset chip.
May 1 13:02:34 florence kernel: [ 202.105730] exe (1771): /proc/1771/oom_adj is deprecated, please use /proc/1771/oom_score_adj instead.
May 1 13:02:35 florence kernel: [ 203.308038] [drm:i915_hangcheck_elapsed] *ERROR* Hangcheck timer elapsed... GPU hung
May 1 13:02:35 florence kernel: [ 203.310081] [drm:i915_do_wait_request] *ERROR* i915_do_wait_request returns -11 (awaiting 22691 at 22663, next 22692)
May 1 13:02:35 florence kernel: [ 203.310481] [drm:i915_reset] *ERROR* Failed to reset chip.

Which looks related. Strangely it seems quite stable using firefox, quite crashy using chrome, so perhaps chrome exercises more of the GPU

Anyone any thoughts?

Thanks

Chris

[umarth]

Same problem here. my computer also has 915gm graphics card. this seems to be an driver issue

[cccc]

I get same problems with my Intel 82845G/GL graphic card.
The Gnome Desktop is freezing completely:

May 23 02:38:09 ubuntu kernel: [ 1200.304006] [drm:i915_hangcheck_elapsed] *ERROR* Hangcheck timer elapsed... GPU hung
May 23 02:38:09 ubuntu kernel: [ 1200.304017] render error detected, EIR: 0x00000000
May 23 02:38:09 ubuntu kernel: [ 1200.304778] [drm:i915_do_wait_request] *ERROR* i915_do_wait_request returns -5 (awaiting 17900 at 17899)

Pls let know if someone find a solution.

[bkratz]

Subscribing to this thread too to see if anything develops. I have the 915GM and have gone back to 10.04 for the same reason.

[mgoldenbe]

Does everyone in this thread also have/had the problem of black screen at boot up? (it seems to be related to the graphics driver as well). Has anyone solved it?

[cccc]

Does everyone in this thread also have/had the problem of black screen at boot up? (it seems to be related to the graphics driver as well). Has anyone solved it?

Which graphic card do you have?

You can try these solutions:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1739646

[mgoldenbe]

Thank you for the very prompt reply. I have Intel 915 (I think there was also a letter after the model number, could be "g", but I am not sure which command to use to show this info) graphics card. I got my computer with Ubuntu 9.10 installed and perfectly working (hence, I do not believe that the solutions from year 2006 that you refer to would be relevant). Once I upgraded to 10.04, I started getting black screen on boot up (after that, the system loaded and worked fine). So, I continued to upgrade to 10.10 and, finally to 11.04. The problem did not go away. With 11.04, the computer started to hang as well, which seems to be correlated with using Chrome (which I did not use with the previous distributions) as reported earlier in this thread.