Cannot get a working virtual terminal after startx

riding_qwerty · n00b Joined: 08 Jul 2010 Posts: 25

Having a minor issue with startx.

After booting gentoo, I get the log message scroll, then modesetting occurs before rcinit brings up various daemons. After logging in and executing startx, whether I use ctrl+alt+f1..f6 or execute chvt 1-6 in a terminal emulator, I am shown the log messages that appeared before modesetting occured and usually cannot ctrl+alt+f7 back into graphical environment (though it has worked once or twice).

Any ideas? This happens whether using xfce or awesome, and I was able to do this without issue a few days ago. This is a pretty fresh install so I can't be sure what I've done to muck things up.

Wormo · Posted: Wed Mar 30, 2011 5:42 am Post subject:

Normally that's an Xorg video driver problem; does 'qlop -l' show any recent xorg upgrades?

riding_qwerty · n00b Joined: 08 Jul 2010 Posts: 25

I know remember that I recently re-emerged xorg-server with nptl and ipv6 USE flags in order to emerge the ati binary drivers, so I am pretty sure it has to with that.

Wormo · Posted: Wed Mar 30, 2011 6:41 am Post subject:

That sounds likely -- sorry I don't have any suggestions for fixing it; if you need to use fglrx, you pretty much just have to keep trying new versions as they come out until hopefully one works right...

riding_qwerty · n00b Joined: 08 Jul 2010 Posts: 25

I did some more poking around on this issue.

My boot would hang for about a minute after trying to load RS780 microcode for the radeon drivers, and complain that r600_cp could not be loaded ( despite having CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE_DIR="/lib/firmware" and CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE="radeon/R600_rlc.bin" set in my kernel config ) before setting to native resolution and continuing to boot. I believe this may have to do with KMS, as my google-fu reveals errors similar to mine to be related to KMS and radeon drivers. Also, I may be missing another binary file in the CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE line, but am not sure which one. My video card is ATI RS780M/RS780MN [ Radeon HD 3200 Graphics ].

I appended "nomodeset" to my boot line in grub and boot time dropped from ~90 seconds to ~20, and I can safely drop into working terminals and back into X. This is acceptable for now, I'll try to get KMS to work properly later. Any sage advice would be appreciated.

I'm sorry if this comes off like word salad, I'm new to a lot of this terminology, but am learning much very quickly. Thanks, Wormo.

dennisn · Posted: Wed Apr 13, 2011 4:10 pm Post subject:

For KMS to work, it needs to load the firmware early in the boot process. You can do this with an initrd image, or, far more easily, simply by compiling the firmware blobs into the kernel, with CONFIG_FIRMWARE_IN_KERNEL.