Re: radeon black screen

[David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk>]

On Mon 13 Mar 2017 at 19:30:32 (-0400), Felix Miata wrote:

> Simplest way to use is purge all traces of Intel, proprietary and
> AMD/ATI drivers, install xserver-xorg-video-modesetting, then
> restart.

When you say get rid of drivers, is that just things like
xserver-xorg-video-foo, or do you also mean things like
kernel modules?

This laptop uses AFAICT the xserver-xorg-video-radeon
package (xserver-xorg-video-all is installed) with lines like:
(II) LoadModule: "radeon"

But long before this, the kernel loads a module called radeon.
I think the latter sometimes gives me problems. For example,
during the previous kernel, exiting X would often lead to the
machine apparently sleeping. The only way of awakening it was
pressing the power button momentarily, whereupon it would wake
up only to shutdown. Well, at least that avoided fscking.

Another oddity is that dmesg always says (both then and now):
[drm] Loading R300 Microcode
radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: failed to load radeon/R300_cp.bin (-2)
radeon 0000:01:00.0: Direct firmware load failed with error -2
radeon 0000:01:00.0: Falling back to user helper
[drm:r100_cp_init] *ERROR* Failed to load firmware!
radeon 0000:01:00.0: failed initializing CP (-12).
radeon 0000:01:00.0: Disabling GPU acceleration

However, if I feed it radeon/R300_cp.bin (by installing
firmware-linux-nonfree), the display goes blank soon afterwards.

lspci -vv gives:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RV350/M10 [Mobility Radeon 9600 PRO Turbo] (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
        Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device 005d
        Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR+ FastB2B+ DisINTx-
        Status: Cap+ 66MHz+ UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx-
        Latency: 66 (2000ns min), Cache Line Size: 32 bytes
        Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 11
        Region 0: Memory at d8000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=128M]
        Region 1: I/O ports at 3000 [size=256]
        Region 2: Memory at d0100000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
        [virtual] Expansion ROM at d0120000 [disabled] [size=128K]
        Capabilities: [58] AGP version 2.0
                Status: RQ=80 Iso- ArqSz=0 Cal=0 SBA+ ITACoh- GART64- HTrans- 64bit- FW+ AGP3- Rate=x1,x2,x4
                Command: RQ=32 ArqSz=0 Cal=0 SBA+ AGP+ GART64- 64bit- FW- Rate=x4
        Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2
                Flags: PMEClk- DSI- D1+ D2+ AuxCurrent=0mA PME(D0-,D1-,D2-,D3hot-,D3cold-)
                Status: D0 NoSoftRst- PME-Enable- DSel=0 DScale=0 PME-
        Kernel driver in use: radeon

Cheers,
David.