i suspect what i'm about to type won't come as a surprise to anyone
currently working on this problem, but there is a cheap workaround to
boot to the command line using one of the offending kernels.
when i boot, say, 2.6.37-rc8+ (or any other kernel, for that
matter), the first two lines i always see are (paraphrasing):
/dev/pts busy ...
ureadahead info ...
and that's it, just those two lines. it's the same no matter which
kernel i boot. and here's where things differ.
for a properly functioning kernel, the display then switches to
hi-res mode, the two lines are redisplayed in a smaller font and the
boot continues normally, right up to the desktop (say, with my
2.6.37-rc5+ kernel).
for a bad kernel (say, my 2.6.37-rc8+), it's that switch to hi-res
after those original two lines of output where the display goes black
and stays that way so it looks like a KMS-related problem.
a workaround to at least let me boot to the command line is to add
"i915.modeset=0"
as a kernel parm, but that won't then let me start X once i'm up and
running. there are all sorts of reports of this type of behaviour,
like this:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=96759
which is where i got the idea to use that kernel parm and the
behaviour i saw matches exactly what's in that post. in any event,
as i reported, this is still happening with -rc8.
rday
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Robert P. J. Day Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA
http://crashcourse.ca
Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday
LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday
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