[CentOS] Hosed by 4.2

Mon Oct 17 13:56:34 UTC 2005
Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>

On Sunday 16 October 2005 15:23, Syv Ritch wrote:
> I ran yum update, it went through and a couple of hours later I
> rebooted and X froze with the screen just being just fuzz
> [regular rectangles, orange, green...] and the keyboard froze.
> Could not do a alt-ctrl-backspace, nor a Alt-F1-6 nor Alt-Ctrl-Del.

> I have a ATI9200 with a Samsung 710N [It only works at 1240x1024
> @ 60Hz, it will not work at any other frequency]

Ok, a couple of data points, and a suggestion.

First, updated my Dell 600m laptop.  Following is the video card:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon R250 Lf [FireGL 
9000] (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [VGA])
        Subsystem: Dell: Unknown device 011e
        Flags: bus master, VGA palette snoop, stepping, 66Mhz, medium devsel, 
latency 32, IRQ 11
        Memory at e8000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=128M]
        I/O ports at c000 [size=256]
        Memory at fcff0000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
        Capabilities: <available only to root>

Ok, that works fine.

Next, updated a Dell 2850 with the following video card:
0b:0d.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon RV100 QY 
[Radeon 7000/VE] (prog-if 00 [VGA])
        Subsystem: Dell: Unknown device 016d
        Flags: bus master, VGA palette snoop, stepping, medium devsel, latency 
32, IRQ 185
        Memory at d0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=128M]
        I/O ports at cc00 [size=256]
        Memory at df4f0000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
        Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2

Same symptoms you have.  I worked around it by disabling rhgb on the boot line 
(see /boot/grub/grub.conf and remove all rhgb kernel command line 
parameters).  Probably something related to the kernel DRM/DRI stuff, 
although the problem persists regardless of kernel I boot (the .11 kernel had 
been working fine, but with the new Xorg it didn't).
-- 
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu