Hmm. I've been looking at a number of other bug reports with Arrandale
and external monitor troubles. There definitely seems to be a
modesetting bug that _appears_ to be particular to arrandale (at least,
the reports I've looked at are mostly all arrandale systems). However,
the symptoms in those cases are quite different from yours - the screen
becomes blank in one set of cases, or the X server locks up
unrecoverably in the other set. I'm going to treat your bug as
unrelated to those, although it couldn't hurt for you to run some of the
same tests I'm having those others do, just to see if it turns up
anything interesting.
As to your question, monitors.xml gets generated by the gnome-display-
properties applet when you Apply your settings. That applet is backed
by a daemon process, gnome-settings-daemon, which I suspect may also
write out the current monitor settings to monitors.xml during shut down
(I'm not certain, but I think it does).
The Fn+F7 key I believe is also tied into the above and handled by
gnome-settings-daemon. However, historically there's been a lot of
different services that have handled that hotkey, so it would probably
be clearer if we could focus on a test case for reproducing the issue
that didn't involve key hits. This is why I suggest trying to repro it
with just the xrandr command. If you run it from console you may have
to do it like "DISPLAY=:0 xrandr --auto" or even specify the outputs
(see man xrandr for some examples).
Here are some other things to test, sorry this is kind of a grab bag of
random ideas:
* After reproducing the issue, run `xset dpms force on`. (If this
works, it suggests a DPMS issue)
* Install xdiagnose and use that to turn on Debug Messages (the first
checkbox). Reboot, reproduce the bug, and then (from an ssh session or
console) collect the output of the command 'dmesg > dmesg.txt' and
attach dmesg.txt here.
* Disable the VESA framebuffer from loading. This can also be done via
the xdiagnose tool.
* Can you describe the flicker in more detail? Can you approximate the
frequency it is running at? If it is flickering at a regular rate it
can suggest some other process (e.g. upowerd) may be polling the
monitor; if so, killing that process may stop the flickering. (I'm
doubtful of this because simply doing Fn+F7 wouldn't be enough to stop
the polling; still, may be worth checking.)
* You indicated this did not occur with your maverick installation.
This suggests testing if you can boot on the old maverick kernel (go
into grub during boot by holding down the left shift key; if it's still
installed you can select the 2.6.35 kernel, if not you'll need to
install it manually) and test if the issue is reproducible. (If this
works, then a git bisection effort might be able to isolate what kernel
change introduced the problem.)
** Changed in: xserver-xorg-video-intel (Ubuntu)
Status: Incomplete => New
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You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu-X,
which is subscribed to xserver-xorg-video-intel in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/758785
Title:
[arrandale] Display flickers or blank on login (x86_64)
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