On Mon, 23 Feb 2015 14:04:22 -0600, [email protected] (Eric Schnoebelen) wrote:
> I've seen this on a DELL 1950. Mostly the 1U version of a 2950, yes? So mostly the same hardware. > My solution was to add "userconf disable radeondrm" to > /boot.conf for persistence (after doing it manually the first > time to be able to see sysinst and anything else. I did that as well for a short while. Then I configured a custom kernel that disabled all the DRMKMS stuff and reinstated the UMS radeondrm driver. The Dell PowerEdge 2950 is very happy in this state. There was some initial trouble starting X because of insufficient "/dev/pci??" nodes (default 12, required 16). After making the additional nodes, X ran very well. Thinking that might have had some bearing on the dim-text problem, I booted a GENERIC kernel again, but the radeondrmkmsfb text was still near-invisible. The HP ProLiant DL380 G5 similarly required more "/dev/pci??" nodes (17 of them) and X worked, but was strangely sluggish. It would take several seconds to redraw objects. Not what I'd expect from dual-quad 2.5GHz Xeons. I'm thinking it might have to do with the ciss/sd0 SAS RAID-1 claiming that one of the units is in danger of imminent failure (just using the disks the machine happened to come with--probably why it was discarded by its previous owner). The Dell PowerEdge 2850 did not like running X at all. I thought it was completely hung. After regaining control, I put a serial console on it and discovered that Xorg claimed 104% of CPU (and rising) while the console spewed the following message: [...] info: [drm] wait idle failed status : 0x80010140 0x00000000 info: [drm] wait idle failed status : 0x80010140 0x00000000 info: [drm] wait idle failed status : 0x80010140 0x00000000 [...] > I'd not realized there was anything vaguely readable on the > screen. To me, it just looked like the cursor was in the lower > left quadrant, about half size (or less) and blinking.. : It's the wild colour scheme that freaks me. When you try and : operate one of these weird black controls which are labelled in : black on a black background a small black light lights up black to : let you know you've done it. What is this? Some kind of : intergalactic hyperhearse? : : -- Zaphod Beeblebrox "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" I suppose it depends on your display settings and ambient lighting (and I suppose user's vision). I have to just about put my nose on the screen to distinguish characters rather than just "that's not quite black". The "white" text looks like a very dim light blue. The green kernel messages are completely invisble. This partly reminds me of a problem from netbsd-[56] and Rage128 cards that after switching to graphics mode, returning to text mode left the text almost-black-on-black. There was supposedly some utility that would restore the text, but I was never able to find reference to it again. -- |/"\ John D. Baker, KN5UKS NetBSD Darwin/MacOS X |\ / jdbaker[snail]mylinuxisp[flyspeck]com OpenBSD FreeBSD | X No HTML/proprietary data in email. BSD just sits there and works! |/ \ GPGkeyID: D703 4A7E 479F 63F8 D3F4 BD99 9572 8F23 E4AD 1645
