Black screen after package upgrade (a311D)

[ephase]

Hi!

I made my packages update / upgrade yesterday and wen I reboot, my screen remains blank. Cold reboot did not change anything. I download the latest system image and put it on a fresh new SDCard, screen remains blank.

So I download system image from last week (kernel 6.11) and all worked as expected. If I do apt update/upgrade then on next boot screen remain blank.

Does someone have the same issue?

[ephase]

Some more information here. On a fresh SD card with kernel 6.11, I updated only the kernel to 6.12 version. On reboot screen remain blank but if I wait a bit screen backlight went darker. So I tried to enter my password and play with backlight keybinding that seems to work well.

So only display seems to be out on kernel version 6.12 on my Reform 2

[josch]

I prepared the rebase of our patch stack onto linux 6.12 here:

Draft: Linux6.12 (!70) · Merge requests · Reform / reform-debian-packages ·...

Could you try to install the kernel from the latest artifacts of that pipeline to see if these exhibit the problem you see? They should not. I’m quite sure I tested these on my a311d reform. I hope I’m not hallucinating…

If that kernel should work, then it is likely, that one of the patches after that broke the display on a311d. Lukas added 14 patches related to pocket reform display panel fixes on top of my linux6.12 rebase and maybe one of those patches accidentally negatively affects the panel of classic reform?

Anyways, to rule that out as a source of the problem, please test my 6.12 rebase without Lukas’ patch stack. If you see the problem there as well, then it is not Lukas’ patches and we have to look elsewhere.

[josch]

For potentially easier testing, here is a full system image with the kernel from the linux6.12 branch from 2024-12-08 for a311d classic reform: Artifacts · build (#7128) · Jobs · Reform / reform-system-image · GitLab

[ephase]

Thanks @josch for replying and for the image, I’ll check as soon as possible.

[ephase]

So screen remains empty at all but with backlight.

[josch]

I can confirm this here.

[ephase]

Ok thanks! So I’m available to test or whatever if you need.

[josch]

Unless somebody has some concrete idea what broke, I think the next step would be bisecting Linux… I’ll try to make some time for this during the weekend but I first have to find another machine to perform the builds on…

[josch]

@ephase

Ok thanks! So I’m available to test or whatever if you need.

If you are still up for testing things, please test the kernel that comes from this repository:

deb [trusted=yes arch=arm64] https://source.mnt.re/reform/reform-debian-packages/-/jobs/7194/artifacts/raw/repo reform main

This should get you kernel version: 6.12.6-1+reform20241222T021703Z

This is the result of reverting upstream commit d97e71e449373efbd2403f1d7a32d416599f32ac.

If users of other platforms can also give it a try, then that would be cool too. It would help avoiding further regressions. If it makes your life easier, I prepared some system images with that kernel here:

Artifacts · build (#7196) · Jobs · Reform / reform-system-image · GitLab

EDIT: now successfully tested on imx8mq thanks to @2disbetter

[tontoncat]

Oh this sound troubling. I have the a311D as well. Did anyone else experience this? Should I wait to upgrade my packages?

[josch]

See this post and my follow-up to it:

Display driver issue?

I’ve run into this problem as well. I can’t update my kernel as the linux-image-6.12.5-mnt-reform-arm64 package in the mnt repo has been renamed to .deb.off so I get a 404 when trying to apt upgrade. I’m not familiar enough with apt to know what to do here. I have linux 6.8.11 packages still installed from the last time I did an upgrade. Is there a way to get apt to swap back to that older kernel?

With the default MNT repo you cannot currently upgrade to the faulty kernel version. If you try, you will just get a 404 as Lukas renamed the broken kernel by adding the .off suffix.

Currently, I only know of myself and @ephase who experienced this issue on their A311D classic Reforms. If you really want to have kernel 6.12, then you can test kernel I built using the MNT gitlab CI using the information from my post above.

[ephase]

Hi @josch and thank you! Here you kernel update work flawlessly.

Do you have information to share about the origin of this?

[josch]

@ephase

Do you have information to share about the origin of this?

What do you mean by “origin” in addition to the commit that has to be reverted that I referenced above?

[ephase]

I found what I was looking for in the MNT sources, thanks

[ve7det]

I have the same problem.

Started thinking I would work through the fix that helped last time, until I read this thread. (and learned it was a whole new issue)

[ve7det]

I intend to roll back to an older image, yesterday’s fix* failed for me. I believe that taking the one from around December 8 will work.

*(tried to use: Black screen after package upgrade (a311D) - #10 by josch)

**Turns out, I picked the wrong one of the files. Trying again.

[ve7det]

OK. Fix worked, but it lost all my settings from before.

Looks like I need to look up how to reconnect to my NVME drive.

Edit: Followed previous advice and have a working system again. Still wish I could install all the updates except the wonky kernel. (Handy advice: Boot Failure A311D Restoring Connection to Encrypted NVME - #21 by josch)

Edit: regular upgrade added 6.12.6 kernel and all is well!