Bug 168054

Summary:	linux consoles flicker after udev starts (not X)
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	G.Wolfe Woodbury <redwolfe>
Component:	kernel	Assignee:	Dave Jones <davej>
Status:	CLOSED RAWHIDE	QA Contact:	Brian Brock <bbrock>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	rawhide	CC:	pfrields, wtogami
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i686
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2005-09-14 05:16:48 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description G.Wolfe Woodbury 2005-09-11 20:16:07 UTC

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050909 Fedora/1.0.6-1.2.fc4 Firefox/1.0.6

Description of problem:
the linux console flickers badly after udev starts ona Celeron with a Trident Cyberblade SVGA card.  Prior to the "storage network audio done" message, the console is fine; afterwards, the console flickers off and on and the display of further messages are overlapping.

Once X startx, the console 7 display is fine, but switching back to 1 reveals a flickering display.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
kernel-2.6.13-1.1547_FC5

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. rawhide install as of 2005-09-10
2. trident cyberblade video card
3. reboot
  

Actual Results:  initial console display of boot messages is ok until the udev startup message that includes "storage network audio done" line appears, then the console flickers on and off.

Expected Results:  console display should remain steady and display rest of the booting messages normally.

Additional info:

System is a Celeron (coppermine) stepping 6 @ 600MHz
video card is Trident Cyberblade (generic)
realtek eth0 (works fine)
one IDE drive (5GiB) on ide0
NFS mount of /home and /srv (working fine - problem appears before mounts)
ATAPI Zip drive in system (not mounted)  Two CD/DVD ROM drives on ide1

Comment 1 G.Wolfe Woodbury 2005-09-12 06:07:10 UTC

The problem is in hte tridentfb module.  Adding tridentfb to
/etc/hotplug/blacklist prevents the module from being loaded by rc.sysinit and
the flicker/blinking goes away and everything is fine from then on.

I note that rc.sysinit references /etc/hotplug/blacklist and there is also an
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist that purports to handle the same sort of errors. 
Which rules?

Also, how would I go about adding module parameters for the tridentfb module in
/etc/sysconfig/modules/* ?  It may be that fiddling with the parameters can help
the problem.  Even so, the tridentfb driver is positively ancient (2002?)

Thanks to whomever for the note on fedora-devel mailing list about the
framebuffers module loading.  It pointed the way.

Comment 2 Bill Nottingham 2005-09-13 03:53:56 UTC

Note that with initscripts-8.14-1, it will no longer be loaded on boot (which is
the correct behavior.)

Comment 3 Dave Jones 2005-09-14 05:16:48 UTC

I'm going to close this as RAWHIDE, as I'm not going to actively debug this
further (largely due to lack of hardware, but also due to being overwhelmed with
more urgent bugs). If you feel inclined to help get the tridentfb driver in
shape, please bring it up in the upstream bugzilla at http://bugme.osdl.org

Thanks.