Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 168054
linux consoles flicker after udev starts (not X)
Last modified: 2015-01-04 17:22:02 EST
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
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.
Note that with initscripts-8.14-1, it will no longer be loaded on boot (which is the correct behavior.)
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.