Created attachment 680359 [details] photo of corrupted Plymouth display during startup My ThinkPad X201 has an integrated Intel HD graphics chipset, and worked fine under Fedora 17. Now under Fedora 18, the display becomes corrupted during the boot startup sequence. This happens regardless of whether I am using Plymouth ("rhgb") or just the text boot style. Once the boot sequence completes, the graphical login screen should be displayed, but instead the entire machine hangs, requiring a hard reboot. I'm seeing this all using kernel-3.7.2-201.fc18.i686 and xorg-x11-drv-intel-2.20.16-1.fc18.i686. If I add "nomodeset" to the kernel command line, then there is no screen corruption. Things seem to proceed normally. I can log in and start my GNOME 3 session. Strangely, the mouse pointer disappears from view when it is not being moved. I have no idea if that's related or a different bug entirely. gnome-shell also seems to consume lots of CPU even when there's nothing really going on. Again, I have no idea if that's related or a different bug entirely. If I boot my Fedora 18 system using the left-over Fedora 17 kernel (kernel-3.6.11-1.fc17.i686), then things behave similarly to the "nomodeset" case: no screen corruption, no hang, just disappearing mouse pointer and high CPU utilization by gnome-shell. System logs show nothing informative. In the case where the system corrupts the screen and hangs, "/var/log/messages" shows only the normal expected startup messages. It ends midway through a message, though, presumably due to buffering and the need to hard-reboot after the hang. "/var/log/Xorg.0.log" is present but zero-length. In an IRC chat (helpfully relayed by Máirín Duffy), Ray Strode suggested that this sounds like a kernel bug.
Created attachment 680360 [details] photo of corrupted display after startup, with system hung
I am getting the same results with the latest kernel (kernel-3.7.2-201.fc18.x86_64). If I boot the original kernel from the installation media (kernel-3.6.10-4.fc18.x86_64) things work as expected. My screen looks identical to attachment 68059 and 60. This is also on an x210 with the i915 chip. Adding nomodeset to the kernel line will allow it to boot, but the video performance is horrendous enough to the point in which I wouldn't consider it a solution. If anyone working this bug is in a RH office, a x201 shouldn't be too hard to find -- it was standard issue for a year or so for mobile employees. I suspect this problem exists on other i915 chipsets too.
My system has an Intel 82Q35 graphics chip and it does something similar. Screen is corrupted (text mode boot) and then hung. Works fine on 3.6.11.
Changing affected platform from "i686" to "All", since apparently this is not specific to 32- or 64-bit systems. Ideally I would mark the platform as either i686 or x86_64, but that's not an option.
[jpriddy@oblong ~]$ sudo lspci -nn | grep -i vga 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:0046] (rev 02) Above is w/ a lenovo x201 product name 36803N6.
I am getting the same results with the latest kernel 3.7.2-201.fc18.x86_64 too. # lspci -nn | grep -i vga 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:2e12] (rev 03)
Several RPMs recently appeared in the updates repository, including: kernel-3.7.2-204.fc18.i686 xorg-x11-drv-intel-2.20.17-1.fc18.i686 With these updates the problem is now gone. No screen corruption during Plymouth boot, and we transition over to the X login screen just fine. The mouse pointer remains visible when not being moved. The xorg-x11-drv-intel update description specifically mentions "fix GPU hangs found with 3.7 kernel". So that's probably what did it. Yay, problem gone!
I have no idea if that is your problem, because nobody gives dmesg. greg found one hang and I found another one see https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/1/14/165