Re: f17 and ATI RAGE128
On Sat, 2012-05-26 at 20:22 -0700, John Reiser wrote: Peter, how in general do you want to proceed where we have documented cases of graphics mode setting failure in grub2? Do you want individual bug reports for each affected bit of hardware? Downstream, upstream? What kind of info should be included? Thanks! What's not good enough about using [the equivalent of] vesafb, so as to to avoid problems with mode-setting? Or, use vesafb unless the PCI vendor:device:version is on a known-good list? Only all the things wrong with VBE, which I don't especially feel like repeating yet again. Graphical bootloader is not my favorite idea. - ajax signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- test mailing list test@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test
Re: f17 and ATI RAGE128
On 05/26/2012 10:51 PM, Adam Williamson wrote: On Sat, 2012-05-26 at 19:00 +, Andre Robatino wrote: G.Wolfe Woodbury redwolfe at gmail.com writes: The problem is that grub2 selects inappropriate video modes for ATI cards The GFXMODE variable preselects a mode for grub2. I've had to do this for a Radeon card. I see this with a GeForce 6150SE nForce 430. Following your instructions allows me to see the grub menu. Smolt: http://www.smolts.org/client/show/pub_ca1da1bd-b1f2-4993-b39c-63a5394c5ca1 Peter, how in general do you want to proceed where we have documented cases of graphics mode setting failure in grub2? Do you want individual bug reports for each affected bit of hardware? Downstream, upstream? What kind of info should be included? Thanks! One for each card is probably fine, though there's some chance these will occasionally be due to the system bios and not the vidoe bios on the card. But whatever; we can coalesce those if needs be. -- Peter Space, is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- test mailing list test@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test
Re: f17 and ATI RAGE128
On Tue, 2012-05-29 at 10:00 -0400, Adam Jackson wrote: On Sat, 2012-05-26 at 20:22 -0700, John Reiser wrote: Peter, how in general do you want to proceed where we have documented cases of graphics mode setting failure in grub2? Do you want individual bug reports for each affected bit of hardware? Downstream, upstream? What kind of info should be included? Thanks! What's not good enough about using [the equivalent of] vesafb, so as to to avoid problems with mode-setting? Or, use vesafb unless the PCI vendor:device:version is on a known-good list? Only all the things wrong with VBE, which I don't especially feel like repeating yet again. Graphical bootloader is not my favorite idea. I did propose disabling it again before release, but a bit too late; we didn't really have enough solid data to justify the change. I'm hoping it won't turn out _too_ terribly. I did spend some time looking into what Ubuntu does (since they've been using grub2 for some time and have a wide base of consumer hardware among their users, I was thinking this may give an indication as to what their experience with graphical grub has taught them). They default to graphical grub, but with quite a few caveats: 1) Unless you're multi-booting, they set the default timeout to 0, so you never see grub by default (you have to edit the timeout or hold down a key on boot). 2) They have an explicit blacklist of hardware that's forced to text mode - the list is in the 'grub-gfxpayload-lists' package. 3) They have a patch to grub that explicitly blacklists a particular mode that is known to be problematic on a specific system: ubuntu_blacklist_1440x900x32.patch , the result of https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/70 . This is obviously an insane road to go down. 4) They have a somewhat large patch to grub which implements a 'failsafe mode', rather similar to the one pjones recently posted for UEFI mode to devel@ under the title [PATCH] Add check_completed_boot command on EFI systems. Briefly, after a successful boot, a setting is flipped somewhere which grub can check. At each boot, grub checks it. If it's not flipped - indicating the last attempt to boot the system was unsuccessful - grub starts up in the 'failsafe' mode, which among other things, uses text mode, not graphical. This patch has not gone upstream, and Ubuntu are still using grub2 1.99 - not any of the 2.0 betas (probably precisely because of this and several other large, non-upstreamed patches) - so we can't easily adopt the patch for Fedora or get it upstreamed. The patch that creates this 'failsafe' mode is 'ubuntu_failed_boot_menu.patch' in the grub2 package; it should be considered to also include the new files grub-common.init and grub-common.pm-sleep that are created in the Ubuntu package (seriously, Debian/Ubuntu, grow a sane fucking patch system already). The use of text mode during failsafe is actually part of the patch ubuntu_gfxpayload_filter.patch . The good news from the Ubuntu investigation I did is that their blacklisting taken in full doesn't actually cover a huge amount of hardware. The ubuntu_blacklist_1440x900x32.patch covers one system (albeit a fairly popular one) - the Thinkpad T400. The grub-gfxpayload-lists blacklist appears to cover only a single Radeon adapter and all VMware VMs. Obviously, I would be more worried if Ubuntu had a huge blacklist, as that would indicate there was lots of known-bad hardware out there we were about to run into trouble with. On the principle of things, I agree broadly with ajax that what's going on here seems suboptimal, with two different projects trying to duplicate the same work (modesetting, and handling hardware that isn't good at modesetting). I believe there are some legitimate reasons why it may make sense to do it in the bootloader, though. Maybe kernel/X and grub need to sit down and thrash out who's going to do the modesetting? If that's not happened already? This obviously has implications for the whole 'smooth boot' idea. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora http://www.happyassassin.net -- test mailing list test@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test
Re: f17 and ATI RAGE128
On Tue, 2012-05-29 at 10:34 -0400, Peter Jones wrote: On 05/26/2012 10:51 PM, Adam Williamson wrote: On Sat, 2012-05-26 at 19:00 +, Andre Robatino wrote: G.Wolfe Woodbury redwolfe at gmail.com writes: The problem is that grub2 selects inappropriate video modes for ATI cards The GFXMODE variable preselects a mode for grub2. I've had to do this for a Radeon card. I see this with a GeForce 6150SE nForce 430. Following your instructions allows me to see the grub menu. Smolt: http://www.smolts.org/client/show/pub_ca1da1bd-b1f2-4993-b39c-63a5394c5ca1 Peter, how in general do you want to proceed where we have documented cases of graphics mode setting failure in grub2? Do you want individual bug reports for each affected bit of hardware? Downstream, upstream? What kind of info should be included? Thanks! One for each card is probably fine, though there's some chance these will occasionally be due to the system bios and not the vidoe bios on the card. But whatever; we can coalesce those if needs be. OK, so Mr. Woodbury, could you possibly file a bug against grub2 at http://bugzilla.redhat.com with the information about your hardware, and what you see with a default grub config? Peter didn't specify what information he needed, so I guess he'll ask in the bug report. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora http://www.happyassassin.net -- test mailing list test@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test
Re: f17 and ATI RAGE128
On 05/26/2012 03:43 AM, Allen Halsey wrote: I found xorg-x11-drv-r128-6.8.2-1.fc17.i686.rpm in the Fedora 17 repo. I installed it and rebooted. As before, I couldn't see the Grub menu, but eventually I was presented the graphical Welcome screen and the system runs well. How can I get the grub menu to be visible? in /etc/default/grub add the definition GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768 then rebuild your grub.cfg file by grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg The problem is that grub2 selects inappropriate video modes for ATI cards The GFXMODE variable preselects a mode for grub2. I've had to do this for a Radeon card. -- test mailing list test@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test
Re: f17 and ATI RAGE128
On Sat, 2012-05-26 at 04:52 -0400, G.Wolfe Woodbury wrote: The problem is that grub2 selects inappropriate video modes for ATI cards This is too broad. Effectively grub2 tries to do modesetting, much the same as X will; it tries to figure an appropriate graphical mode for the card/monitor combination in use. On a _few_ configurations this fails, because either the card or the monitor provide incorrect information about their capabilities. It's certainly not the case for anywhere close to all 'ATI cards', or all cards from any manufacturer. It's specific broken bits of hardware. I believe grub2 doesn't yet have quite the sophistication X has in place for handling broken hardware, and hence is likely to hit issues somewhat more often than X does. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora http://www.happyassassin.net -- test mailing list test@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test
Re: f17 and ATI RAGE128
On 2012/05/26 09:50 (GMT-0700) Adam Williamson composed: G.Wolfe Woodbury wrote: The problem is that grub2 selects inappropriate video modes for ATI cards This is too broad. Effectively grub2 tries to do modesetting, much the same as X will; it tries to figure an appropriate graphical mode for the card/monitor combination in use. On a _few_ configurations this fails, because either the card or the monitor provide incorrect information about their capabilities. It's certainly not the case for anywhere close to all 'ATI cards', or all cards from any manufacturer. It's specific broken bits of hardware. I believe grub2 doesn't yet have quite the sophistication X has in place for handling broken hardware, and hence is likely to hit issues somewhat more often than X does. The only r128 I ever use on purpose is in a reliable but old Dell laptop. I've not used it in a while, but last I checked, when KMS was rather young, I was told not to expect KMS support for r128 to materialize. If that remains the case, whatever is being done regarding mga probably needs to be done for r128 and whatever other ATIs people still use that are older still. -- The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant words are persuasive. Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation) Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks! Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/ -- test mailing list test@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test
Re: f17 and ATI RAGE128
On Sat, 2012-05-26 at 19:00 +, Andre Robatino wrote: G.Wolfe Woodbury redwolfe at gmail.com writes: The problem is that grub2 selects inappropriate video modes for ATI cards The GFXMODE variable preselects a mode for grub2. I've had to do this for a Radeon card. I see this with a GeForce 6150SE nForce 430. Following your instructions allows me to see the grub menu. Smolt: http://www.smolts.org/client/show/pub_ca1da1bd-b1f2-4993-b39c-63a5394c5ca1 Peter, how in general do you want to proceed where we have documented cases of graphics mode setting failure in grub2? Do you want individual bug reports for each affected bit of hardware? Downstream, upstream? What kind of info should be included? Thanks! -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora http://www.happyassassin.net -- test mailing list test@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test
Re: f17 and ATI RAGE128
Peter, how in general do you want to proceed where we have documented cases of graphics mode setting failure in grub2? Do you want individual bug reports for each affected bit of hardware? Downstream, upstream? What kind of info should be included? Thanks! What's not good enough about using [the equivalent of] vesafb, so as to to avoid problems with mode-setting? Or, use vesafb unless the PCI vendor:device:version is on a known-good list? -- -- test mailing list test@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test
