[5828] in Release_7.7_team
Re: Trouble with onboard video for Dell Optiplex 745 and Athena installs
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Cattey)
Sat Sep 1 10:54:58 2007
In-Reply-To: <E4BCC1CC-1E42-4F23-88EF-991E3882C731@eecs.MIT.EDU>
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Cc: "andrew m. boardman" <amb@MIT.EDU>, release-team@MIT.EDU
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From: William Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Date: Sat, 1 Sep 2007 10:50:56 -0400
To: Myron Freeman <fletch1@eecs.MIT.EDU>
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I did a quick review of release notes for RHEL 4, 4.5 and 5.
Only the RHEL 5 release notes seem to have a relevant mention of
support:
> The i810 driver supports all integrated Intel graphics chipsets,
> from i810 to i965. However, the support for i830 (and newer)
> chipsets is limited; the i810 driver can only set modes listed in
> the video BIOS. If your machine has an i830 or newer chipset
> installed, run the following command to determine what the
> available modes are:
>
> grep Mode: /var/log/Xorg.0.log
>
> Modes marked with an asterisk (*) are available for selection.
Andrew, Greg,
If it would fit into our framework for externally supplied drivers,
there is an open source GMA3000 driver out there:
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/08/10/intel_posts_g965_linux_driver/
-Bill
----
William Cattey
Linux Platform Coordinator
MIT Information Services & Technology
N42-040M, 617-253-0140, wdc@mit.edu
http://web.mit.edu/wdc/www/
On Aug 31, 2007, at 3:37 PM, Myron Freeman wrote:
>
> On Aug 31, 2007, at 12:44 PM, andrew m. boardman wrote:
>
>>
>> Hi! Thanks for the bug report. Many questions and possible
>> suggestions:
>>
>> Could you better describe lala land? Blank, frozen, something else?
>> Have you tried hitting control-P a bunch of times to see if the
>> text mode
>> login will come up? Is it just the display wedged or is it the whole
>> machine? (Can the affected machines be pinged from elsewhere?)
>>
>
> Basically, after a while, the screen goes blank with the standard
> blue background but no login window. The machine still works
> otherwise; control-p does give you the text console.
>
>>> Everything appears to revolve around having to use the generic VESA
>>> drivers as opposed to something specific for the Intel GMA3000 on
>>> the
>>> motherboard.
>>
>> Which drivers are they using now?
>
> The default vesa driver. Drivers specific for the Intel GMA3000
> built-in graphics on the motherboard doesn't seem to exist in the
> version of Linux that Athena currently uses.
>
>> Our cluster 745s come with ATI Radeon
>> hardware; per lspci:
>>
>> 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV516
>> [Radeon X1300/X1550 Series]
>>
>> On these machines, the default installer uses the vesa driver, but
>> there's a script that runs at boot time which, on machines with
>> PUBLIC=true set, swaps the vesa driver for the proprietary ATI
>> drivers
>> which are *much* faster. There's a bug with this, however, in
>> that the
>> script only works on machines which have cluster info in hesiod.
>> (There's a new version of the script in
>> /afs/dev/user/amb/scripts/installproprietary-x-drivers-new.sh which
>> doesn't need cluster info.)
>
> I'll buy a few Radeon x1300/x1550 cards and try them.
>
>> On the other hand, Intel-specific drivers
>> are included in the base release and the installer should likely have
>> used the "intel" driver (vice vesa).
>>
>
> As I said, the GMA3000 seems to be too new for the release of Linux
> that we're using.
>
>> Could you send me (or leave in AFS somewhere readable) copies of
>> /etc/X11/xorg.conf and the output of "lspci" from one of the affected
>> machines?
>
>
> Sure.
>
> -Fletch
>
> <lspci-eelab02-video>
> <xorg-eelab02.conf>
>
>
