[Xen-devel] Screen corruption and crash at boot with Xen 4.1.0 & linux 2.6.39 on some systems

[Anthony Wright <anthony@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have a custom built system based on LFS 6.6 with xen 4.1.0 & linux 2.6.39 
built from source. The system boots correctly on one system (after a problem 
with the USB disk has been worked around), however when I try to boot the same 
system on another machine the screen corrupts shortly after handover from the 
bootloader. This happens on 2 out of the 3 machines I have tried it on.

I was originally using xen 4.1.0 & linux 2.6.38.7, and with this combination 
the bootloader would work correctly, xen would work correctly and it would 
crash and the screen corrupt on the handover from xen to linux. I had a hunt 
around and found http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenPVOPSDRM which talks 
about the graphics subsystem and says "What is boils down to is: if you want to 
use a stock kernel from ftp.kernel.org wait till 2.6.39 gets released". As a 
result I have switched to xen 4.1.0 & linux 2.6.39 but get the same result.

The motherboard is a Gigabit GA-MA69VM-S2.

The lspci -vvv output is attached.

What I did notice is the way the screen resolution changes during boot is 
different for the two main machines that I test on. On the machine that works, 
instead of the 80x25 console that I'm used to with xen 3.4.1, I get a much 
higher resolution output with two penguins at the top with 4.1.0. When I boot 
the system without the xen hypervisor linux starts at the 80x25 resolution but 
then quickly puts the screen into high resolution. On the machine that fails, 
when I boot the system without the xen hypervisor, linux starts at 80x25 
resolution, appears to do a resolution change (whole screen flickers) a few 
seconds later but leaves the resolution at 80x25.

Am I doing something wrong? Is this a bug? Is there a workaround? Should I try 
a different kernel version?

I'm happy to live with the 80x25 resolution screen but none of the screen 
resolution options that I've tried have had any effect.

Thanks,

Anthony.

gs_ma69vm_s2-lspci-vvv
Description: Binary data

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