Bug#840897: general: framebuffer modules for non-dri graphics cards are not loaded

[Michal Suchanek <hramrach@gmail.com>]

Package: general
Severity: normal

Hello,

I dusted off a notebook with hardware serial port which also happens to have a
Mach64 graphics card.

Accidentally during system upgrade an extra display manager was installed which
broke the text console. Running two X servers without KMS is problematic.

Upstream has a solution that should prevent most of these problems. The current
X drivers seem to work reasonably well with fbdev so long as the fb module is
loaded before the X server is started. At least the Mach64 driver looks ok.
Since the X driver appears to have fbdev integration it should not break the
console so long as fbdev is available.

Unfortunately, atyfb is not loaded by Debian. What's worse, adding the driver
to /etc/modules or /etc/initramfs-tools/modules has no effect. The module is
not loaded.

So I would like the fbdev modules removed from whatever blacklist prevents
loading them and have them loaded on systems that don't have dri modules to
handle graphics.

Thanks

-- System Information:
Debian Release: stretch/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (500, 'oldstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 4.7.0-1-686-pae (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)