[ubuntu-x] [PPC] KMS is hurting. Can I help?

[Bryce Harrington]

On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 03:15:11PM -0500, Str8bs wrote:
> Greetings all,
> 
> There are multiple bugs apparently related to KMS with both nouveau and
> radeon. This is causing blank screen issues for many PPC users from 12.10
> through Raring daily tests getting failed. Those who are able to fall back
> to FBDEV will experience "slow" performance due to software rendering.

Black screen issues can have a wide variety of underlying causes, but be
aware of bug #982889, a race condition that exists between plymouth and
lightdm, which can cause certain kinds of boot failures quite similar to
what you're describing.  There is a known workaround (add sleep to
lightdm.conf) which can be used to rule in or out that bug as related to
what you're seeing.  There's a few other work arounds and checks - see
the bug report for details.

Assuming it to be the same issue as that, we're hoping to see a plymouth
fix soon.  If you're interested in helping test things, join #ubuntu-x
on freenode and talk to tjaalton.

> I am not qualified to become a part of your team and no use whatsoever at
> creating patches. I am very new to Linux myself. However, I could attempt to
> help triage bugs by cleaning / clarifying the titles, tags and soliciting
> logs from other reporters. Maybe help them with SSH set up to obtain more
> logs. Would that be of any help?
> 
> As an example, I attempted to follow the guidelines
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Debugging in my own bug report -
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-nouveau/+bug/11
> 70054
> 
> If this would be helpful, could someone clarify the following:
> Should I -
> Just go ahead and retitle / retag bugs and mark bugs missing logs as
> incomplete?
> Or, just suggest the reporter do so and link to debugging / triaging X wiki?
> Link to other arches / upstream reports found?

Any/all of that would definitely be helpful.  Linking to upstream
reports or patches is the most helpful, since it makes it a lot easier
for package maintainers to chase down fixes.

Fwiw, I use a greasemonkey script that adds buttons to the bug report
that lets me easily paste in various standard debugging tips:

  https://code.launchpad.net/~bryce/launchpad-gm-scripts/main

Or if you just want to see the tips themselves:

  http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~bryce/launchpad-gm-scripts/main/view/head:/ubuntu-x-replies.xml

For many bugs, steps to reproduce are vital.  Often the logs and
backtraces don't paint a complete picture, so being able to reproduce
the issue is key.


> Or, leave that to someone more experienced?

There's more than enough bug reports to go around!  :-)

Seriously though, there's scant few people experienced enough to do bug
work, and with Mir we're being stretched ever thinner.  We do try to
stay atop the bug reports against the current development release that
were reported through apport; anything else is probably not going to get
attention.

Bryce