Public bug reported:
This is an issue that was happening under a fresh Ubuntu 8.10 install, and it
has continued to happen since a recent upgrade to 9.04. I'm opening this bug to
help diagnose this issue and possibly develop both a workaround and a fix.
The machine in question is an eMachines T2824, and I'm using the built-
in graphics system that's part of the motherboard. 'lspci' reports it is
an "Intel Corporation 8245G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated
Graphics Device (rev 01)", with subsystem "Intel Corporation Device
5352".
The problem that I am seeing is that, on a fair percentage of boots
(around 40-50%), the machine appears to hang with a black screen
immediately after the splash screen progress bar fills up. This happens
before the background color is changed, the mouse cursor appears, or gdm
comes up. The machine appears completely unresponsive at this point, and
I cannot access alternate terminals via CTRL-ALT-# as might be expected.
In order to help diagnose the problem, I have set up ssh-server so that
I can remotely log into the machine while it is "hung". Remote login
works perfectly normally when the screen is black, and inspecting the
output of 'ps aux' shows two instances of /usr/sbin/gdm being executed.
Attempts to restart gdm with 'sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart' do not work. At
least one instance of gdm seems to be unresponsive to commands:
- 'sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop'
- 'sudo kill <PID of instance>'
- 'sudo kill -9 <PID of instance>'
In addition, remotely executing 'sudo shutdown -r now' fails to shut
down the machine, and it must be powered off completely to try to
restart.
Some items to note:
1) The hang seemed to be avoided every time I accessed the GRUB menu and
overrode the 'quiet' and 'splash' options from the default boot menu
entry, then booted. However, making the change permanent by adjusting
/boot/grub/menu.lst has still resulted in at least one hang on a cold
start.
2) The hang also seemed to be avoided every time I accessed an alternate
terminal during the splash screen. In these cases, the display switches
to gdm when it is initialized, as would be expected.
3) I'm not positive that gdm is the ultimate culprit here, but I am
filing this bug against gdm because that is the program that appears
unresponsive.
4) This issue is not limited to cold boots. I have seen the same thing
happen on warm restarts as well, and can be reliably reproduced by
executing 'sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart' a few times successively.
I'm not an expert, but I can certainly follow directions to gather more
information about this problem. Please let me know what additional
information you would like to help diagnose this issue.
gdm version = 2.20.10-0ubuntu2
lsb_release -rd = Ubuntu 9.04
** Affects: gdm (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
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Ubuntu 9.04 gives black screen after splash, remote login shows hung/unkillable
gdm instance
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/370111
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