[SOLVED] Slackware64 13.1 Nvidia framebuffer woes - blank screen after lilo

damgar · 06-11-2010, 05:11 PM

You seem to have gotten caught up in the libata switchover which is what's going on with the reordering of your drives? The fact that it only happens with the generic kernel seems odd, but I would think that http://slackware.mirrors.tds.net/pub..._AND_HINTS.TXT specifically the "LIBATA SWITHCOVER" section would give you an answer. I'm not familiar with raid, but if you can use uuid's for the raid drive you can take the sd[A,B,C] bit out of the equation.

ahmadj · 06-11-2010, 05:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by damgar

You seem to have gotten caught up in the libata switchover which is what's going on with the reordering of your drives? The fact that it only happens with the generic kernel seems odd, but I would think that http://slackware.mirrors.tds.net/pub..._AND_HINTS.TXT specifically the "LIBATA SWITHCOVER" section would give you an answer. I'm not familiar with raid, but if you can use uuid's for the raid drive you can take the sd[A,B,C] bit out of the equation.

I think it's to do with the order the drivers are loaded in. In huge, scsi drivers are compiled in and load before ata drivers, meaning the raid controller gets the first device nodes. In generic, only ata drivers are compiled in (and therefore load before the raid drivers), so they get the first call on sda.

ahmadj · 06-12-2010, 09:35 AM

@ponce -

turns out it doesn't work so well after all. It was working last night, not working this morning. After a few cold reboots, it worked again. Weird.

What I've ended up doing is setting vga=ask in lilo.conf instead of the actual vesa mode, and selecting from the menu on bootup. This seems to work consistently.

EDIT: No, it still doesn't work. I can only get framebuffer after a warm reboot. All other times it fails and locks up the PC. Something to do with KMS perhaps? ie. BIOS not configuring the card correctly for bootup, but KMS doing something (on a successful boot) which makes it work on the reboot? A quick browse of dmesg (from a bootup where framebuffer worked) showed me that the new (since 2.6.32) vgaarb (vga arbiter) comes in really early in the boot process. Could that have something to do with it?

I'm clutching at straws here to be honest, no idea what's really going on. Seems like it was a bad decision to 'upgrade' to 13.1, though...

ponce · 06-12-2010, 11:02 AM

i confirm you i tried and (as I remember the last time I tried some kernels ago), nvidia drivers and vesa modes don't play well together, as I wrote early.

as vesa modes aren't vital for me (3d stuff instead it is), it's better if I move on on other thingies: tnx for the hints, btw

but I don't think in my case it's related to kms/13.1 as it always happened to me, like I wrote before.