Hi folks,

This concerns problems booting amd64 Debian 7.1.0 on
the 2010 Macbook Pro (model A1286) wherein the screen becomes garbled,
and stays garbled, right after the i915 driver prints a message like
"Attempt to get IRQ failed. Aborting."
No login prompt is reached.

The story: I decided to put a spare hard drive into my 2010 Macbook Pro 6,2
in place of the main drive that has OS/X on it, so that I could
run GNU/Linux.

I booted up the first Debian AMD64 installer CD and installed the OS.
I rebooted and it appeared Debian was booting properly when suddenly
the lower half of the screen became garbled.

I looked closer at what the kernel is printing out.

First it says i8042: No controller found. (The Macbook Pro does not have PS/2.)

Then it prints some mundane stuff, then it says "Found HC with no IRQ.... error -19".

Then everything's OK, I enter my password to open the encrypted partition,
and then the i915 driver tries to load and it prints
"Attempt to get IRQ failed. Aborting."

_____
First attempt to fix this:

I tried booting instead in safe mode, but this did not fix
the problems.

_____
Second attempt to fix this:
I tried editing the boot commands and inserting this line: i915.modset=0
and this one: acpi=off. I booted by pressing F10 (control-X doesn't register the control key.)
These commands did not have any effect.
In forums, most people say to insert lines into the boot script before the "linux" line.

_____
Third attempt to fix this:
I tried adding these "commands" to the linux line itself. What I added specifically
was acpi=off noefi. This led to many more interrupt warnings.
It also led to the keyboard not working at all, and then the i915 driver says its ROM is corrupted,
among other errors.

_____
Fourth attempt to fix this:

Again I added the "commands" to the linux line. This partially worked, insofar as
it booted past the i915 errors and I finally got to a login prompt after pressing Fn-Control-Option-F1 i.e. to get to a virtual console.
The specific parameters that worked: i915.modeset=0 noefi.

_____
Question 1: How did the i915 driver get to be so messed up? Is KMS the culprit?

Question 2: How did it come to be that the USB cannot get IRQs? I should think this type of issue was solved 10 years ago in kernel 2.4 so why it is coming up now?

_____
Note that in contrast to my difficulties with Debian 7.1, I do find that Debian-based Tails 0.19 works
quite well and starts up with X. Even the Wifi works.
I assume it is using an older kernel before "KMS" was added to the kernel.

If I had to choose between Debian and Tails I would
prefer to use regular Debian, so...
Can anyone assist me in getting this to work?

Thanks!

i have had the same problem... the funny thing is i installed Debian Wheezy with no problems before and it booted fine. now i just cannot get it to work... i have triple booted my MBP 6,2 osx 10.7.5, win7 and had linux mint but preferred Debian. i think the only difference is that this time i have a SSD drive instead.. (key phrases "i think").

i would love to run debian on my mac. otherwise i am planning to buy a new machine to just run debian 7.0

i only use my MBP for ipad and iphone syncing, sibelius and ipages (as i have files saved in those formats)

People shouldn't have to buy new hardware just to use Linux, especially when
this should be a trivial fix. For what it's worth I'm booting from a hard disk, not an SSD.

On the plus side, I have gotten Slackware 64-bit 14.0 to boot just fine with a few
minor tweaks... Note though I am single-booting a MBR-enabled drive and using LILO.

apparently debian 6.0 squeeze works no problems but have not tried it...

i am going to try to install wheezy on the storage drive (the one i put in place of the optical drive) and see if that has any effect.

i will try squeeze on the SSD and see how that works..

let you know tomorrow...

i am using rEFIt to boot this stuff. i still have osx on the MBP. and i am thinking that i maybe didn't have windows on the machine when i had wheezy on there.. so only a dual boot... i don't use windows really so i might just get rid of it..

eventually will (hopefully) have wheezy and a small partition of OSX.. but really need a working Debian distro on it.


update..... still no luck..

ok have got it working in fallback..

# apt-cache search linux-image

install new kernel

#aptitude install linux-image-3.10-0.bpo.3-amd64

#aptitude install linux-headers-3.10-0.bpo.3-amd64

add backports nonfree to your sourcelist....

update and reboot..

i can login now, but not working too well.... cannot open anything that uses high graphics.... still working on it....