Hello Everyone,
I'm running the x86_64 bit version of CentOS 4 on a dual AMD Opteron server. The graphics card is an ATI Radeon X300. At the moment, Xorg is configured to use the open source driver, radeon. The server itself is connected to a KVM switch, which has otherwise not caused any issues.
Recently, the virtual terminals have started to go blank and then not come back. What I mean by that is that the VTs from 1 to 7 do not display anything (the server is typically running in run level 5). I thought perhaps DPMS was on, but no amount of typing on the keyboard brings them back.
I then considered it was related to the vga=791 parameter I was passing to the kernel - there were many mtrr errors reported in /var/log/messages. However, removing that parameter hasn't fixed the problem.
Restarting GDM or changing the server's run levels doesn't work either. Only a reboot resolves the issue. (Hmmm...now that I think about it, removing the radeon module and adding it again might be equivalent to the reboot).
There's nothing in /var/log/messages or in the xorg log file to indicate a problem. All the tty processes are running normally.
I'm just wondering if anyone else has experienced this before. If so, is switching to the proprietary driver the only option? Is there anything else I can look at? I'm suspecting it's a driver issue, and so will shortly try the proprietary driver from ATI.
Thanks,
Ranbir