efflandt
April 2nd, 2017, 10:54 PM
I have roughly 10 year old Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop that I do not run very often with legacy VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RV515/M52 [Mobility Radeon X1300]
It is currently running 64-bit 16.10 and for some reason its BIOS only lets it use 3327 MB RAM even though its sees 4096 installed, but that is not the issue.
It did updates today from kernel 4.8.0-34 to 4.8.0-45 which stops booting when it gets to a blank screen with static cursor which does not respond to mousepad and nothing else responds, cannot get into virtual consoles with Ctrl+Alt+F1, etc. The only way to get out of that is hard shutdown (5 sec power button). If I replace "quiet splash $vt_handoff" with "text" for 4.8.0-45, it does display boot messages in low resolution then a higher resolution, before showing Ubuntu with dots under it, results of e2fsck, then reverting to the blank screen with static cursor. If I try to boot recovery, when I try to enable networking, it does its thing and just hangs without going back to the recovery menu. If I replace "quiet splash $vt_handoff" with "single" it will boot like text mode switching from lower resolution to higher resolution (smaller) text and I can get to root console. I actually did "single nomodeset" to see if the nomodeset changed anything, but dmesg said:
[drm] VGACON disable radeon kernel modesetting.
[drm:radeon_init [radeon]] *ERROR* No UMS support in radeon module!Kernel 4.8.0-34 still boots normally. From looking at syslog in that, 4.8.0-45 appeared to boot fine. The only potential graphics error I noticed said:
[Firmware bug] Duplicate ACPI video bus devices for the same VGA controller, please try module parameter "video.allow_duplicates=1" if the current driver doesn't work.But from the rest of syslog it looked like radeon properly loaded without errors and recognized devices VGA-1, LVDS-1 (laptop screen), and SVIDEO-1.
So what should I look for or try, to see why 4.8.0-45 ends up on a blank screen, vs. 4.8.0-34 which works fine like it should?
I have not had any problem with 4.8.0-45 on my desktop PC, except that I don't know when something started killing my microphone in 16.10 when it works perfectly fine in 14.04. But that is subject for another post.
It is currently running 64-bit 16.10 and for some reason its BIOS only lets it use 3327 MB RAM even though its sees 4096 installed, but that is not the issue.
It did updates today from kernel 4.8.0-34 to 4.8.0-45 which stops booting when it gets to a blank screen with static cursor which does not respond to mousepad and nothing else responds, cannot get into virtual consoles with Ctrl+Alt+F1, etc. The only way to get out of that is hard shutdown (5 sec power button). If I replace "quiet splash $vt_handoff" with "text" for 4.8.0-45, it does display boot messages in low resolution then a higher resolution, before showing Ubuntu with dots under it, results of e2fsck, then reverting to the blank screen with static cursor. If I try to boot recovery, when I try to enable networking, it does its thing and just hangs without going back to the recovery menu. If I replace "quiet splash $vt_handoff" with "single" it will boot like text mode switching from lower resolution to higher resolution (smaller) text and I can get to root console. I actually did "single nomodeset" to see if the nomodeset changed anything, but dmesg said:
[drm] VGACON disable radeon kernel modesetting.
[drm:radeon_init [radeon]] *ERROR* No UMS support in radeon module!Kernel 4.8.0-34 still boots normally. From looking at syslog in that, 4.8.0-45 appeared to boot fine. The only potential graphics error I noticed said:
[Firmware bug] Duplicate ACPI video bus devices for the same VGA controller, please try module parameter "video.allow_duplicates=1" if the current driver doesn't work.But from the rest of syslog it looked like radeon properly loaded without errors and recognized devices VGA-1, LVDS-1 (laptop screen), and SVIDEO-1.
So what should I look for or try, to see why 4.8.0-45 ends up on a blank screen, vs. 4.8.0-34 which works fine like it should?
I have not had any problem with 4.8.0-45 on my desktop PC, except that I don't know when something started killing my microphone in 16.10 when it works perfectly fine in 14.04. But that is subject for another post.