Booting F9 with NO X11

Kasper Pedersen fedoralist at kasperkp.dk
Mon Jun 9 06:26:57 UTC 2008


Rick Bilonick wrote:
>
> Sounds great on paper - this was the first thing I tried when F9 booted
> into a blank non-functional display. Unfortunately, everything was
> locked up completely. I had to use the power button to re-boot - nothing
> else was possible. The solutions was to add "text" to the boot options
> to boot into a text console and try to fix xorg.conf from there.
> Unfortunately, the best I could do was display on an external monitor
> attached via the vga port - have not been able to get F9 to display on
> the notebook's own lcd display. So I've installed F8 (wiping out F9 for
> now). F8 works fine (only added acpi=off to avoid an error message). I
> don't get the highest possible resolution but is functional (and
> wireless works with ndiswrapper).
>   


Sounds similar what I spent the evening getting to work:
I have a machine, a Q6600 on a board with P35 chipset (P5Kpro), 4GB ram, 
and a gf7900. F8 x86_64 will run fine, F9 will freeze hard (no 
alt-sysrq) with a garbled mouse pointer when X initializes. If I disable 
rhgb, I can initialize X once and log in, meaning that it looks like 
switching out of graphics mode like the server does when one logs out 
trashes something, and rhgb exiting counts as one.

My guess it that when the nv driver (snd somehow the vesa driver too) 
exits, it causes 768MB of physical memory to disappear in one physical 
address, and reappear in another.

If I reduce memory to 2GB, it works.
If I replace "nv" with "vesa" in xorg.conf, I get an out of scan range 
display, can log in blind once, logout, and the machine takes a reboot.
If I use a gf6600 instead, one with an agp-pcie bridge on it, it works.
If I disable chipset memory remapping in bios, F9 sees 3.3GB instead of 
4.0, and it works.
If I install the nvidia blob drivers from livna, it works. With remap 
and 4.0GB.
With F8, it works with remap, 4.0GB usable, and the in-the-box nv driver.

The above holds for both an iso install, and fully updated.
Something's changed somewhere; I recall trying 8.92 on this machine.

/Kasper Pedersen




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