Bug 531147

Description of problem:

This problem is with a new Dell Studio laptop when installing the Fedora 12 x86/64 Beta. I haven't got as far as running a completed installation, but I see no reason to doubt it would suffer similarly. X crashes pretty reliably during the timezone selection phase of installation unless I pass "nomodeset" on the kernel args for the installer. I originally reported this in a comment to bug #517625 but was informed that that bug was now only for cases where adding pcie_aspm=off to the kernel command line was a successful workaround - in my case it did not help.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

Fedora 12 Beta

How reproducible:

At the point mentioned below, easily within a few seconds.


Steps to Reproduce:

The lockup occurs just by accepting defaults until you get to the Timezone selection page. All I have to do is move the mouse over and over the graphical map and then it locks up in a few seconds (it doesn't lock up if left outside).  
 
Actual results:

Once locked up, the mouse pointer can still move, but nothing else works, including ctrl-alt-f1, ctrl-alt-del, alt-sysrq-anything. Sometimes the screen goes completely blank instead (and locks up). Sometimes there's some dots at the very top left of the screen. Unfortunately the lock-up means I can't switch back to the console to look at X.log :-(. Repeating the exact same with "nomodeset" on the kernel cmdline and there's no lockup.

Expected results:

No freeze!

Additional info:

Here's the relevant lspci -v which I've had to transcribe, not cut'n'paste:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Mobility Radeon HD 3650
(prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
 Subsystem: Dell Device 02a0
 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16
 Memory at d0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
 I/O ports at 2000 [size=256]
 Memory at fc000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
 [virtual] Expansion ROM at fc020000 [disabled] [size=128K]
 Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 3
 Capabilities: [58] Express Legacy Endpoint, MSI 00
 Capabilities: [a0] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
 Capabilities: [100] Vendor Specific Information <?>
 Kernel driver in use: radeon

Transcribing /tmp/X.log is too hard :), but I did notice:
(EE) AIGLX error: dlopen of /usr/lib64/dri/r600_dri.so failed
(/usr/lib64/dri/r600_dri.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or
directory)
(EE) AIGLX: Reverting to software rendering

which may be a factor, albeit unlikely. I can copy out anything else specific if you ask.

Unfortunately I cannot properly install FC12 Beta as I'm going to have to swap
out this laptop due to an unrelated fault. But hopefully this may allow someone
to reproduce the problem, without even having to get as far as installing FC12
beta (no hard disk changes are required for example). I can hopefully provide more data (e.g. X.log) next week if my laptop issue is resolved, but FC12 schedules may not be able to wait for that. If downloading an i386 or Live image would be a real benefit I could do that, but bandwidth is a bit of an issue for me.

I have only set the severity as medium as there is a workaround, but it is going to lead to a poor user experience if such a workaround is needed. Needless to say, crashing during installation is not going to win new followers, and later yum updates won't help with installation.

Incidentally I tried running the installer with the extra kernel arg radeon.modeset=0 as also suggested in bug #517625 (instead of nomodeset), but this resulted in /sbin/loader SEGVing on boot before anaconda has even had a chance to properly get going:

running install...
running /sbin/loader
loader received SIGSEGV! Backtrace:
/sbin/loader[0x40783e]
/lib64/libc.so.6(+0x335f0)[0x7f0cb59aa5f0]
/sbin/loader[0x40c2f9]
/sbin/loader[0x408819]
/lib64/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xfd)[0x7f0cb5995b4d]
/sbin/loader[0x4058f9]
install exited abnormally [1/1]

Should I submit this as a separate bug? Is this meant to work?