xfce4 freezes on startup with ati card and xf86-video-ati

JustAnother · Apprentice Joined: 23 Sep 2016 Posts: 186

I did a routine update on my radeon ati machine yesterday. Today:

I always run startxfce4 from the terminal. Today the screen would freeze up and show one underscore cursor at upper left. The keyboard was frozen. Ssh worked, showing nothing in /var/log/Xorg.0.log. Thankfully I keep a tee of emerge --sync so I could notice that no xfce4 packages were upgraded yesterday, but x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati went from 19.0.1 to 19.1.0. I ran

Hu · Administrator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21715

I would start by reading the log files that elogviewer uses. This is probably at least /var/log/emerge.log, and maybe other related logs such as /var/log/emerge-fetch.log.

jburns · Posted: Tue Nov 26, 2019 5:43 am Post subject:

The app-portage/genlop package is an emerge.log parser.

JustAnother · Apprentice Joined: 23 Sep 2016 Posts: 186

I tried:

Hu · Administrator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21715

Yes. Using uninitialized values in a concatenation usually means that the block that was supposed to initialize the value got skipped incorrectly.

JustAnother · Apprentice Joined: 23 Sep 2016 Posts: 186

The X.org people seem to think this xf86-video-ati 19.1.0 fixed the problems vs. created the problems. Who should give them the good news?

JustAnother · Apprentice Joined: 23 Sep 2016 Posts: 186

Here's a little good news. I finally got around to bumping xf86-video-ati from 19.0.1 to 19.1.0, which previously caused the screen to go blank when I ran startxfce4.

This post: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1105588-highlight-.html uncovered the fact that my build-in kernel driver radeon was not loading the ati firmware file, because there was no root filesystem or initramfs mounted at that point. Anyway, after getting the firmware to load, xfce4 comes up on my main machine. However, the same problem on what the link calls machine 3 still exists.

A simple suggestion: in your wiki section for the major desktop managers, point out that the drivers (first) need to be checked via dmesg for complaints, or the manager may not work.

To reiterate, here is what I think happened. The X people released xf86-video-ati 19.1.0, saying that it fixed freeze ups, etc. But this driver worked before, and the radeon firmware wasn't loading, so it looks like the X people made some kind of change that broke the system if the radeon kernel driver couldn't load the firmware. There aren't any complaints over at X that say 19.1.0 is broken, so this must be happening to a small number of people.