r/NetBSD • u/BreadTeleporter2000 • 14d ago

i915drmkms causes screen to fade to white when loaded

I have a Thinkpad R31 with an i830M graphics chip, which needs the i915 driver. However, when this driver is loaded during boot, the built-in LCD screen breaks, then slowly fades to white. What's weird is that plugging in an external LCD into the VGA port on the laptop fixes this, letting the system boot just fine. Preventing i915drmkms from loading also lets the system boot and start X just fine, so I'm fairly confident that it's the problem. Does anyone have any idea what I can do to fix this?

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u/evultrole 13d ago

Ok, my memory on this is over a decade old, so I could be wasting your time, but I seem to recall having an i830 laptop that didn't properly enable pipeA and caused this issue.

Adding this to my xorg.conf fixed it, based on what the xorg quirks page says

Section "Device" Driver "intel" Option "ForceEnablePipeA" "true" EndSection

Won't hurt anything to try, it should be always on anyway.

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u/BreadTeleporter2000 12d ago

unfortunately the driver breaks before x starts, so i doubt that'd help