[Bug 83023] New: A problem related to Radeon DPM causes a corrupted console and black X display.

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=83023

          Priority: medium
            Bug ID: 83023
          Assignee: xorg-driver-ati at lists.x.org
           Summary: A problem related to Radeon DPM causes a corrupted
                    console and black X display.
        QA Contact: xorg-team at lists.x.org
          Severity: normal
    Classification: Unclassified
                OS: Linux (All)
          Reporter: colin.carney at gmail.com
          Hardware: x86-64 (AMD64)
            Status: NEW
           Version: 7.4 (2008.09)
         Component: Driver/Radeon
           Product: xorg

Created attachment 105205
  --> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/attachment.cgi?id=105205&action=edit
The contents of dmesg

Hello everyone,

I have a significant problem with my display related to the Dynamic Power
Management of my radeonsi display driver.

I am running Arch Linux on my notebook computer, an HP EliteBook, model No.
C7A70UT.  It has an AMD FirePro M4000 video card, which is very similar to a
Radeon HD 7750M, both part of the Southern Islands series.  My video driver is
Arch's current 'xf86-video-ati 1:7.4.0-3', which I suspect is a compiled and
renamed version of Xorg's Radeon 7.4.

When I reinstalled Linux on my computer last fall, I set it up to boot to a
console, and I may then start Xfce 4 from the command line.

The trouble is that as the computer boots, it at some point adjusts and clears
the display.  After that time, the console display is somewhat obfuscated by
grainy vertical lines of red, yellow, and green pixels.  The last message I can
read before the display is adjusted is 'Reached Target Sound Card' and the
first message in the corrupted display is 'Started trigger flashing of journal
to persistent storage...'  (the dots '...' are part of the message).  There may
be some messages that I am missing since I cannot pause the boot sequence - my
notebook does not include a separate scroll lock key, and cntrl+s doesn't work
very well.

More seriously, if I start X-windows the screen becomes completely black, and
it remains black if I try to switch to another tty.  I don't know if the
computer is otherwise running normally, or if the operating system realizes
something is wrong.

Fortunately, I can partially work around the problem by forcing the video
driver to use the 'high' setting, e.g. by using the command
# echo high > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level
After running that command, any areas of the screen which are re-drawn (e.g.
newly typed characters, or the whole screen after switching to another tty) are
drawn correctly and X will run normally.  However, my battery life is reduced
from 3 hours to between 1 and 2 hours.

To the best of my understanding, my driver uses the setting in the file
/sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_state to determine its operating state,
and this is set to 'balanced' by default.  Changing the contents of that file
to 'battery' or 'performance' does not resolve my bug.  Nor does setting
/sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level to anything other
than 'high' (i.e. 'low' or 'auto').

I first noticed this problem when I upgraded to the Arch 3.13.4-1 kernel (I
think that was the first one which enabled DPM by default), and it still
persists on my current kernel, Arch 3.16.1-1.  Prior to that time, I only set
the dpm performance level to 'high' prior to playing 3-D games, and I never had
any problems.

Please let me know if there is any other information I can provide to assist
with the debugging process (perhaps output from lspci or a screenshot), or if I
should send my bug report to someone else.

Thanks in Advance,


Colin Carney

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