That's correct: if the i915 module isn't loaded, then the console works normally. I tried loading the driver by hand after booting and the console becomes frozen: nothing new is displayed. But, yes, the system is still running. I've always been able to SSH when the console is frozen. The console does take input: I tried typing the shutdown command as you suggested and the system did respond by shutting down cleanly.
I turned on the debug messages and it produced a ton of output. Nothing stood out to me, other than the error I mentioned earlier. I don't know what to look for really. But the error was this: error: [drm:pid886:gen6_gmch_probe] *ERROR* Can't set DMA mask/consistent mask (-5) Another thing to mention is that I've had kernel.kms_console=1 in loader.conf. I got that from an example but don't actually know what it means. Generally, I'm wondering where to find documentation on settings like that, and maybe find out about related ones. Chuck On 2021-05-20 03:26, karu.pruun wrote: > So I am I right to think that you can get the console fine but loading > i915 gives a frozen screen? > > To test this is true, remove automatic > loading of i915 from /etc/rc.conf and see if you get to the login > prompt. Then try manually loading i915 on console, as root do 'kldload > i915'. You can get more debug messages by setting 'drm.debug=0x777' in > /boot/loader.conf. > > It will be a lot of debug output but might help diagnose the issue. > > Question: when the screen freezes after kldloading i915, can you still > ssh into the machine? Can you do 'shutdown -r now' by typing on the > console? > > Best
