Blank screen at boot with kernel 3.1
Hello,
I'm installing Debian on a new computer and although the install of
stable version works fine, after upgrade to testing I am unable to
boot on the 3.1 kernel. There is no X on the machine (for the moment)
and I get a blank screen a few seconds after boot. I suspect a problem
with the graphics card (NVidia GTX 570) and nouveau, but couldn't find
a workaround.
Here are the details. Sorry, that's a bit long, but I wanted to put
all I can here. Also, note that I'm not in front of the machine right
now, so I'm typing this from memory and some notes, and cannot test
stuff until tonight...
I've bought myself a new computer and want to install a Debian/testing
on it. I burnt a CD with the latest stable to start with (I was not
quite sure how to get a testing CD and anyway I've had years of
upgrading various Debian so I was quite confident the stable ->
testing upgrade would work fine). The installation with the CD works
perfectly, I can use the graphic installer and I install the
"standard" system (no graphical environment at that point).
After reboot, I get a working Debian/stable with kernel 2.6.32 (I
think). First thing I do is to change sources.list to add the contrib
& non-free repos as well as the testing ones (main, contrib &
non-free). Update, full-upgrade: almost everything seems to be
updated, as expected, including installing a kernel 3.1.0. No error
messages, except one warning when the kernel is upgraded about
potentially missing firmwares for my network card (realtek) and
nouveau. For nouveau, these are the same warnings as described here,
for example: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=185&t=83587.
Now, this is only a warning, but after this, whenever an upgrade step
rebuilds the initrd, I get warnings about missing firmware for
realtek. Only for realtek, nothing about nouveau here. So I install
the firmware-realtek package, and lo and behold, the warning disappear
when initrd is rebuilt. Because I never get warnings about nouveau
while generating initrd, I don't know whether these missing firmware I
was warned about are really missing...
Are these firmwares really useful? I couldn't find anyone on the web
saying so, all I find are messages where people ask about it. They
don't seem to be anywhere in any Debian package (even in non-free).
OK, so now I get what I think should be a working up-to-date testing
system. Rebooting on the 2.6.32 kernel works again perfectly. But
rebooting on the 3.1 kernel starts to boot (it prints at least the
"waiting for udev to be populated" message) and then all I get is a
blank screen. Some messages get displayed before, but so fast that I
have no hope to even catch a glimpse of a word. The screen flickers
when it becomes black, at about the time where in the 2.6 kernel the
screen resolution changes, so I guess this is the step that fails.
With the blank screen, I can't do anything. Keyboard seems dead (at
least "Caps Lock" doesn't respond, although "Num Lock" does). The
machine is still alive and can be logged-on remotely, but that's all.
I didn't see anything strange in syslog or dmesg, but I might have
missed something.
I stress here the fact that I am only working in console. No X server
has been installed yet, and certainly no display manager (so when
booting, it stays in console). I will install an X server later but I
feel that I should fix problems one at a time... (actually, I did a
first install with the graphic environment as well and things didn't
work better, so I started again a fresh install without it, to better
isolate problems)
>From searching on the web, it looks like a KMS or nouveau problem. I
have tried blacklisting nouveau (by adding a custom file containing
"blacklist nouveau" in /etc/modprobe.d), but this doesn't change
anything. I tried also installing the nvidia driver (since I want to
install it ultimately anyway), by installing the nvidia-glx package.
It installs OK, build the 3.1 DKMS kernel module without errors, but
still get the same error when booting. It does install an X server at
that stage (which is expected) but this server is normally not started
at boot, so I'm still only dealing with console. I also tried to put
"nomodeline" in the boot parameters (/etc/default/grub, then
update-grub) but again, this doesn't change anything.
So I'm stuck with a working 2.6.32 kernel, and a broken (and unusable,
at that point) 3.1 kernel.
As a last resort, I wanted to try and install the nvidia module on the
2.6 kernel (thinking that I could stay with that one for some time,
assuming later versions of the 3.1 kernel will work better that the
current one...), but trying to do so requires the kernel headers,
which in turns requires an older version of gcc, and one thing causing
another, aptitude would basically downgrade most of my system back to
stable, which is not what I want (I mean, if I wanted a stable system,
I would have stuck with it from the start).
So, does anyone have an idea of what is causing the problem, and how
to fix it? I must say that I am very disappointed, my old computer is
running the 3.1 kernel without ever complaining (well, not about this
at least...) and I was not expecting such big problems with a brand
new one...
Thanks!
--
Rémi Moyen
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