Re: kmscon not working on MacBook

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hi,

"pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)" <pelzflorian@pelzflorian.de> skribis:

> On Sun, Mar 08, 2020 at 10:03:26PM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> In the past, Mathieu, Florian, and others looked at similar issues on
>> some graphics boards.  Perhaps there’s something we can do here to
>> special-case this hardware?
>> 
>> Ludo’.
>
> The affected hardware is diverse and I see no pattern.  I would favor
> restarting with mingetty.  However, the installer runs but just has no
> display, so I do not know how to detect it.
>
> My Macbook using “NVIDIA Corporation MCP89 [GeForce 320M] (rev a2)”
> runs the installer just fine.
>
> A desktop PC using “NVIDIA Corporation GM107 [GeForce GTX 750 Ti] (rev
> a2)” runs it just fine too.
>
> Another PC using “Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Oland PRO
> [Radeon R7 240/340]” runs the installer just fine (but not Xorg X).
>
> A laptop Acer Aspire 5738 using “Advanced Micro Devices,
> Inc. [AMD/ATI] RV710/M92 [Mobility Radeon HD 4530/4570/545v]” *fails*
> with a black screen; manual installation is required (which I have not
> tested but probably works).
>
> Another laptop Uniwill U50SI1 using “Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS]
> 771/671 PCIE VGA Display Adapter (rev 10)” *fails* the same way.
> Manual install works fine.  Note that I cannot boot non-Windows
> install images (Debian or Guix) on this machine, only via DVD, and
> Xorg X server only runs using uvesafb with a v86d helper.
>
> None of these installers flicker; the screen is black or it runs fine.

For the cases where kmscon actually fails (exit with a non-zero code),
a solution would be the following: instead of running kmscon directly,
we run a wrapper around it that spawn mingetty (as you suggested) when
kmscon exits with non-zero.

(Perhaps the flickering Joshua mentioned was actually due to kmscon
being continuously restarted by shepherd?)

However, in cases where kmscon does *not* exits and simply produces a
black screen, I don’t see what can be done.  In the cases you list
above, does kmscon simply sit there without exiting?

At any rate, thanks for the testing & detailed info!

Ludo’.