[ubuntu-x] Lost monitor at boot (was Re: Nouveau - remaining tasks.)

[Bryce Harrington]

On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 01:38:37PM +1100, Christopher James Halse Rogers wrote:
> Finally, I'm still seeing some reports on IRC of nouveau turning off the
> monitor on boot, leaving the system unusable.  I've done some
> investigation, and I've got a hypothesis: if vga16fb gets loaded first,
> it claims fb0 and everything dies a fiery death.  

Are you able to reproduce this issue?  Is there a bug# for tracking?  If
not, let's get a bug report in about it filed against
linux-backports-modules.

Also, why would this fail for some people but not others?  It seems like
something which should always work or always fail.

> From my slight understanding of modules.order, the in-kernel gpu drivers
> won't suffer from this because they're listed before vga16fb.  Testing
> this by editing modules.order to place i915 after vga16fb results in my
> intel laptop displaying similar symptoms.  I'm not familiar with how the
> kernel uses modules.order, though, so this could be wrong.  It suggests
> that we may have the same sort of problems should we pull 2.6.34 drm
> into lbm for intel & radeon, though.

Well, assuming the kernel team does go forward with the drm full
backport of .33 the immediate issue goes away at least.

Is the solution as simple as just making sure l-b-m loads its drm
modules prior to vga16fb?  If so, could whatever adds this line simply
be made to insert it in the line prior to vga16fb?

Bryce