After the upgrade to Ubuntu karmic 9.10 with 2.6.31-14 kms was pretty stable. Then with a number of upgrades including 31-14, the radeon.modeset=1 boot option would eventually freeze the system (with dri=on and the compiz features enabled). Apparently, this happens when windows are being manipulated (moved, resized, scrolled etc) Nothing seems to work then, except for the REISUB SysRq keys which would restart the machine. A very strange and weird fact is that these crashes either leave no traces in the system logs or render them unreadable just right when the system hangs. I will upload the logs in question anyways. Some (possible) ways to reproduce: Install or upgrade to Ubuntu karmic 9.10 on Toshiba Satellite L35. Then update the kernel images. Boot with the radeon.modeset=1 option. This system will hang eventually , when the session is run for some time and windows are being manipulated. System: uname -a Linux 2.6.31-16-generic #52-Ubuntu SMP Thu Dec 3 22:00:22 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux description: Notebook product: Satellite L35 vendor: TOSHIBA version: PSL33U-03W02K width: 32 bits lspci 00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc Device 5a31 (rev 01) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 PCI Bridge 00:12.0 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 Serial ATA Controller (rev 80) 00:13.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB Host Controller (rev 80) 00:13.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB Host Controller (rev 80) 00:13.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB2 Host Controller (rev 80) 00:14.0 SMBus: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 SMBus Controller (rev 82) 00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 IDE Controller (rev 80) 00:14.2 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB4x0 High Definition Audio Controller (rev 01) 00:14.3 ISA bridge: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 PCI-ISA Bridge (rev 80) 00:14.4 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 PCI-PCI Bridge (rev 80) 01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RC410 [Radeon Xpress 200M] 09:01.0 CardBus bridge: ENE Technology Inc CB1410 Cardbus Controller (rev 01) 09:02.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10) 09:04.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR2413 802.11bg NIC (rev 01)
Created attachment 24170 [details] excerpts from the syslog of the crashed system, look for the garbled entries
Forgot to tell, that booting without the radeon.modeset=1 option does not seem to freeze the system. Wait and see...
reported this bug in launchpad.net https://bugs.launchpad.net/linux/+bug/489447
Can you try 2.6.32 or Dave's drm-radeon-testing branch? http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/airlied/drm-2.6.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/drm-radeon-testing There have been a lot of bug fixes since 2.6.31.
Thanks Alex, It might.... Sorry, I should have mentioned it before Since 1.6.32.rc7 when booting to GNOME I get no further than gdm. The system gets locked with a black screen and not SysRq keys working. Moreover, 2.6.32 stable and drm-next from http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/ gave me this even worse situation. Please see this report http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14331 Another thing is how can a bug be fixed, if no one knew of it, it seems, before I reported it? I have not seen garbled logs bugs since 2002, let me know if you had. Please let me know Thanks
does booting with pci=nomsi fix the problem? If so, this is likely a duplicate of bug https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15626