Re: Blank screen at boot with kernel 3.1
On 2012-01-25 16:33 +0100, Rémi Moyen wrote:
> Well, I'm guessing that at the early stage of the boot some very crude
> driver is used and things fail when the kernel tries to load/use
> something more complicated. Kernel 3.1 can display something but only
> using the "big" characters at startup (something like 80x25, I would
> guess).
This is the standard text mode which you get when you don't load a
framebuffer driver such as vesafb or nouveaufb (the latter is part of
the nouveau.ko kernel module).
> Kernel 2.6 switches to smaller characters very early in the
> boot sequence and I am guessing that this is when attempting that that
> the kernel 3.1 fails. But that's just a guess and doesn't really help
> me...
>
> Also, I noticed that when I did a first install with graphical
> environment, X was working with the 2.6 kernel (obviously not with the
> 3.1...) and the xorg.0.log was saying something along the lines of
> "searching a driver for your card, trying (in this order) nouveau, nv,
> vesa" (not the exact messages, but that was the gist of it). Then
> error messages about not being able to load nouveau (with the 2.6
> kernel, again, so why was it not working there?),
I assume because the card is not supported by the nouveau module
in the Squeeze kernel. IIRC, you need Linux 2.6.38 at least.
> same errors for nv
> (which was normal because at that point I had not installed the
> xserver-xorg-video-nv package so I was not expecting X to be able to
> use it)
Would have been useless anyway, nv does not support your card.
> and finally doing some stuff with vesa (it might have been
> trying something with "fb", vesafb or the like before?). Then when
> logging in Gnome for the first time, I got another error saying more
> or less "cannot use all the fancy graphic stuff because you're not
> using the right drivers" (I'm rephrasing, you can guess...).
You have to use either the NVidia blob or nouveau with a kernel >= 3.2
and libgl1-mesa-dri package >= 7.11.1-1.
> Yep, will do that tonight. Why drm, btw? I did notice that this was
> associated with nouveau in a number of messages, but is there a
> specific module for it? If yes, would blacklist/uninstall nouveau be
> enough or should I also try to do something about this drm stuff?
If you want to make sure nouveau does not do anything harmful (or
useful) ever, boot with the "nomodeset" kernel parameter.
Sven
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