[Bug 561301] [NEW] [RV690] flicker on startup, dead black screen after some time with lucid if KMS enabled

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Binary package hint: xserver-xorg-video-ati

It is tricky to determine if this issue is the same as one reported in
the several bugs about freezes / black screens, so I'm making a new
one...

I installed a amd64 ubuntu lucid lynx beta1 system on a box with a Foxconn mainboard that features integrated radeon graphics, namely RS690. The system has all current updates as of last saturday.
I notice some things, possible related to the final freeze/crash/whatever:

1. Multiple flickering on startup, sortof in intervals of about a
second. This includes the plymouth splash screen and the desktop after
it appeared (automatic login) for some time. Annoying but not fatal as
such, as it seems to stop, generally (maybe reappears once on certain
actions, like starting a video player).

2. There is only a VGA connector and there the monitor is connected. The
radeon driver complains about bad EDID data for the DVI port, multiple
times. Well, there is no physical DVI port.

3. After some undetermined time of usage, the screen suddenty goes
black, and I am unable to reach a console. I need to have a second
computer to get debugging, I guess. The machine is not frozen, but the
screen is gone.

This persists with a self-built 2.6.33.2-rt13 kernel (since this is
supposed to be an audio workstation) in the same manner, with the linux-
rt kernel it was a bit different (for example, I needed to fix the
resolution in xorg.conf because with that kernel a wrong one is
detected), I did not spend enough time with it to trigger that black
screen ... or indeed it does not happen there.

I'll try starting with nomodeset ... then examine if there are still
options like switching back to XAA (that worked in the past for the
buggy intel drivers) ... or resort to VESA. I actually have no time to
debug Xorg issues on that box, but well... do I have a choice? With
another non-ubuntu system (older Xorg at least, kernel version about the
same), this never occured. So it might have to do with the recent enable
of KMS, or acceleration architecture updates.

** Affects: linux (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New


** Tags: lucid
-- 
[RV690] flicker on startup, dead black screen after some time with lucid if KMS enabled
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/bugs/561301
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