Many regressions for K8M800 on Acer Aspire 1362LC

Submitted by Reimar Döffinger

Assigned to Kevin Brace @kevinbrace

Link to original bug (#104438)

Description

The hardware is a laptop with a 1024x768 panel (LVDS). Unfortunately I have access to this hardware about 1 week/year and that is usually used up just getting it to work at all. Nevertheless I'll try to put up an overview of the issues and progress I had with the openchrome driver, sorry if it's a bit long a unsorted. The biggest annoyance is how so many debug options have been removed, making it near impossible to just hack things to avoid all the auto-detection code that is not working. That in addition these options were never removed from the man page wasted a significant amount of time in addition. Starting point was around Ubuntu 10.04 when the driver as far as I remember just worked. In Ubuntu 12.04 it was necessary to use the VBEModes option to get it to work again (otherwise the screen would be corrupted and even switching to another VT would fail to fix it). In 16.04 (0.3.3 driver with patches?) that just started to crash with VBEModes, so I had to find a workaround...

It seems the issue is a bad modeline, the first one is the one added by the driver, the second one the proper one that Windows uses that I added manually: Modeline "1024x768"x59.9 63.50 1024 1072 1176 1328 768 771 775 798 -hsync +vsync (47.8 kHz UeP) Modeline "1024x768"x60.0 65.03 1024 1056 1192 1344 768 771 777 806 -hsync -vsync (48.4 kHz) It is somewhat worrying that the first mode-line breaks things so badly that not even switching back to a console VT can restore things to working.

Even with this, XVideo is no longer not working (neither with nor without DRI, nor with or without DMA - DMA if enabled prints errors).

So the next attempt was to use the 0.5 driver from the Ubuntu 16.04 hwe packages. That driver is completely unusable since it claims the panel is 800x600 panel and thus refuses to use the only good modeline from above. Unfortunately the option to override the panel size was removed, so I was unable to debug any further. Using git, things are broken even worse, it now claims there is no flat panel connected, but instead a TV is connected. The ActiveDevice option does not seem to work (also removed without removing from the man page?) so I haven't been able to do any useful testing with the git version. I'll should be able to selected logs that would be useful until Jan 5th, though faster progress/debugging would be possible if there many of the removed debugging options could be restored.

Version: git