CentOS 7, ATI Video, Ex-X

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A user running gnome came in this morning, clicked on the application menu… and it was much shorter than he expected. He could get to firefox, and googled about refreshing that… and found something that told him to reboot.

And that’s it: I cannot get X up, at all. I just get the “oh, no, something failed, please log out and try again”.

Fully updated CentOS 7, [AMD/ATI] Oland [Radeon HD 8570 / R7 240/340 OEM], and, like most of us, he uses two monitors.
. I’ve tried removing the xorg.conf, and renaming
/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-fglrx.conf, which was there (I didn’t put it there when I built the box a few months ago.)

I don’t see anything even vaguely useful in the Xorg logs… and, for that reason, not sure why I’m on Xorg.3.log, other than it may have been created by startx. I’ve tried that, both as root, and as myself, get that
“oh, no” screen, and when I hit enter to log out, I get a live but black screen, completely unresponsive.

I don’t see any errors in dmesg or messages, and I’ve tried reinstalling xorg-x11-drv-ati, which gives me xorg-x11-drv-ati-7.6.1-3.20160215gitd41fccc.el7.x86_64.

Does anyone have any ideas on this? I can’t even get a single screen working, though it’s mirrored, of course, in text mode.

mark

8 thoughts on - CentOS 7, ATI Video, Ex-X

  • What if you boot into runlevel 3 (that is no gdm or kdm…), log in into virtual console, rename all X related stuff in /etc, and from command line execute

    startx

    ? What do you get spit on console, and what do you get in xorg log?

    Incidentally, do you have security system that watches file changes? That may tell you a lot. As an alternative, you may take a look at differential backup – whatever was newly backed up may tell you a story. Unless backup uses timestamps, and timestamps were fiddled with when change happened.

    Valeri

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • Hello Mark,

    Anything in /var/log/audit/audit.log? That would be my first guess if you can’t find anything obvious elsewhere.

    # restorecon -r -v /
    (or use a more specific path)

    or

    # touch /.autorelabel and a reboot

    to fix labels.

    Regards, Leonard.

  • Valeri Galtsev wrote:

    So far, I’ve force fsck (and I DESPISE systemd, oh, no, we *can’t* let you use /forcefsck, we’ll ignore it, you need to change the grub2 command line….), brought it up in runlevel 3, and no difference – startx gives me the idiot screen, and hitting exit gives me a live screen – monitor’s not in power save, but black, blank, and it won’t accept keyboard input. And I can’t make it let go without a reboot (at least doing what I’ve been trying).

    Yum doesn’t seem to have a group-reinstall – I was going to try to reinstall GNOME desktop.

    mark

  • This makes me think it has the 3rd-party fglrx drivers installed, but the new kernel you rebooted into didn’t, and the GL stuff is broken.

    Gnome3 requires a working GL X server, even if it’s Mesa. IIRC the fglrx RPMs moved the Mesa drivers aside or something questionable. I’d make sure you don’t have a half-installed fglrx setup, and if not, make sure that the Mesa packages are OK.

  • Jonathan Billings wrote:

    I’m the one who built the box from our repo, with out ks. I just doublechecked, and there’s no package or tarball, which I would absolutly….

    Just had a second thought, based on what you said… and looked. And found I had installed kmod-fglrx from elrepo, last packaged/built in March.

    I would have *thought* that it would complain, or, for that matter, take a lot longer to rebuild the driver…. Maybe I need to go looking for a way to force it to rebuild.

    mark

  • Hallo mark,

    I have compiled nvidia, intel and radeon (amdgpu) into my system.

    You can take a look at it:

    http://CentOS.cms4all.org/repo/7/drivers/

    I run my machine with the current stable kernel 4.8.15

    http://CentOS.cms4all.org/repo/7/kernel/

    For some tests i run winehq and other applications so far.

    with my mesa built 13.0.2 + LLVM 3.9.0.

    http://CentOS.cms4all.org/repo/7/mesa/

    Tested in the past with radeon 6870 and today r9 280x.

    Sincerely

    Andy

    They not signed – private work(around) -, but the sources are there :-)

  • Mark,

    as a side node

    take a look into /usr/lib/modprobe.d/

    fglrx take a blacklist for the radeon driver in the past

    sincerely

    Andy