Bug#590893: Squeeze on Dell E6510, i5, intel graphics
On Tue, 3 Aug 2010 12:28:33 -0400, Julien Cristau <jcristau@debian.org>
wrote:
>> 2. Starting X failed and froze the whole machine (flashing LEDs).
>> ... After changing the video driver named
>> in xorg.conf to "vesa" ... screen brightness varies randomly.
>>
> Which exact kernel version was that (as reported in /proc/version)?
/proc/version says
Linux version 2.6.32-5-amd64 (Debian 2.6.32-18) (ben@decadent.org.uk) (gcc
version 4.3.5 (Debian 4.3.5-2) ) #1 SMP Sat Jul 24 01:47:24 UTC 2010
But the failure is pretty robust. Upstream 2.6.32.17 has various of
the i915 fixes found in 2.6.35. When those get into unstable's 2.6.32
kernel, I'll try them and report. Probably loading i915 with modeset=0
under upstream 2.6.32.17 would kernel-panic, if experience with 2.6.35 is
any predictor.
>> 3. The i915 driver found in experimental linux-image-2.6.35-rc6-amd64
>> is fixed. Installing that with apt-get fails for dependencies on
>> unavailable linux-base and firmware-linux-free. I built my own from
>> apt-get source and make-kpkg, and it works.
>>
> Hopefully there'll be some more fixes in 2.6.35.1 for that, but please
> report the 2.6.35 issue at bugs.freedesktop.org against product DRI,
> component DRM/Intel anyway, so we can track it more easily.
I have been in correspondence with Dave Airlie and Chris Wilson.
Apparently there's a bug open for this there already. It's not
really fixed in 2.6.35-any, as various events (suspend/resume,
inactivity timeout, plug in VGA, etc.) can still cause a blank
screen.
Adding to the original report... the Grub2 graphical boot menu does not
come up reliably on this machine; sometimes it shows, sometimes it
doesn't.
It probably should default to the text-mode menu.
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