screen blinks a lot during boot

i forgot to mention that this is happening in Gutsy. feisty did not have this problem.

I had this on my 915 chip with 4:3 screen, too. While loading X, it seems like it has troubles finding the right resolution (although the only one used is 1024x768), causing screen "blinking" for 2 or 3 times until it finally starts. With i810-driver this does not happen.

My ship is also the Intel 915. The problem seems to happen only in a fresh Gutsy installation. It does not happen upgrading from Feisty.

Are you sure that you are using the new intel driver after upgrade? Like I've said before, when using i810 instead of intel, this does not occur.

Gert and Brenno, can you both please attach your Xorg.0.log and xorg.conf files, and the output from lspci -vvnn.

Sounds like perhaps you have some chipset-specific quirk. The logs should show what xserver was attempting to do.

If you wish, I've also packaged a version of -intel from upstream's git HEAD. I wouldn't recommend running this in general, as it has several other new issues (such as direct rendering failing), but you might find it interesting to test to see if the issue already has a fix identified. I don't think this is a serious enough issue for us to fix in Gutsy, since X eventually does come up.

http://people.ubuntu.com/~bryce/Testing/intel/xserver-xorg-video-intel_2.1.1~git20071004-0ubuntu1_i386.deb

Here comes the first part of the requested files. The Xorg.0.log I'll post later on, because at the moment I'm using i810 driver which, like I've mentioned before, does not have this issue.

Here is my xorg.conf.

Finally, the requested log-file.

No further testing for intel driver, because of Bug #141063 (why this one is only set to priority medium, it should be high or even critical priority!) which makes my whole system unusable.

@Bryce
Before I'll forget it: Concerning the lack of dri in the git driver, please have a look on Bug #88918. Though this is about the fact that i915tex is not used on chips that support it, it may be corelated.

I have noticed an extra blink during X startup on my intel mobile chipset (965 gm). A little bit of searching turned up this post on the xorg mail list: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2007-July/026533.html . It indicates that the extra blinking is due to the detection mechanism in the new intel driver, and that this may be improved in the future.

If this problem is not happening in Feisty or in upgrades from Feisty to Gutsy, perhaps it is because these installations are still using the i810 driver.

Here is something I was playing with. It saves the hardware registers once only during the driver's pre-init phase, and doesn't restore them until VT swtich.

The normal driver init sequence has an additional hardware restore step, which brings the card back to its lit up console state before switching off again and programming graphics setup. This patch drops the extra restore, which seems to work in my case at least.

Peter

xserver-xorg-video-intel (2:2.1.1-0ubuntu10) hardy; urgency=low

  [ Bryce Harrington ]
  [Peter Clifton]
  * 08_fix_855_3D_state.diff
    - Emit the invariant 3D state to the GPU during EnterVT after
      marking the 3D state as clobbered. This fixes / works around
      textured surface corruption after resume on 855GM hardware.
      (Closes LP: #133118)
  * 07_fix_startup_blink.diff
    - Alter startup sequence to avoid blinking the display whilst
      initialising the graphics chip.
      (Closes LP: #148686)
  * 04_fix_hw_restore.diff
    - Only restore PIPE[AB]CONF if the DPLL for that PIPE is running
      and not in VGA pipeline mode.
      (Closes LP: #108056)

  [Kyle McMartin, Bryce Harrington]
  * 06_sync_quirks.diff:
    - Sync TV out quirks with upstream

 -- Timo Aaltonen <email address hidden> Thu, 01 Nov 2007 21:44:36 +0200