GMA X3100 VERY strange fact

[slogican]

Hi everybody,

 

First of all - don't laugh, please, since this fact is not a joke: X3100 normal boot on my laptop depends on CPU temperature.

 

I have a trouble booting 10.5.5 on GMA X3100 laptop (X3100 drivers are 1.5.30 version). But I noticed that it sometimes boots without any EFI strings & injectors. It boots successfully on "cold" system. Cold - I mean if power was off for an ~1hour, and CPU is cold (~30C degrees)- then it boots. after some time if I reboot - gray screen with vertical lines, CPU temperature at this time is above 40C. after it cools - it boots normally again...

 

I understand that it is not a temperature problem... but maybe any ideas why this may happen? maybe some extensions are loaded when temperature become hotter? ACPI driver? ACPI settings?..

 

Other fact - when system loads successfully, I have a string in system.log:

display: match category IOFramebuffer exists

in case of unsuccessfull boot:

display: no matching... (do not remember exactly the string)

so, probably the cause of error is not VGA, but display? can anybody else with X3100 problem check this?

 

my system: Intel dual-core 2Gz, 2Gb ram, X3100, intel 965G (or 960G?), ICH8

boot with DSDT override, installed from iDeneb 10.5.5

 

any ideas?

[mackerintel]

I have on X3100 first "display: no matching..." and then "display: match category IOFramebuffer exists". Perhaps you missed first message during normal boot. I can't dismiss your info as I didn't check it yet but it seems more for me that successful or unsuccessful boot is just a random effect. On my system I had similar problem. Solved it installing old AppleIntelGMAX3100FB.kext+EFI string.

[Geniusdog]

Very same bug since 10.5.2. To me it seemed the opposite that it had trouble on a cold boot instead of a warm boot. I found that if I repeatedly plugged and unplugged a USB mouse during boot it would fix this but not with the trackpad and also if I would boot into Vista, do a complete proper shutdown, and then reboot into OS X it would work. I tried holding power button to shut down Vista and then immediately boot into OS X but that ALWAYS gave me a garbled screen, I'm guessing due to garbage Vista doesn't clear on a force shut-down as it would on a proper shut down.

[CharredPC]

Add me to the list of people frustrated by this issue.

 

Using iDeneb 10.5.5 here on an Acer Extensa 5620 (X3100). Installed OSX without selecting any videocard drivers, and everything seemed to work perfectly... until the laptop sat overnight, then it booted to a garbled screen with a vertical black bar. It seems that the warmer the laptop is, the better the chances are of booting up properly. After using it for an hour, I can reboot or shut down / restart all I want and it works flawlessly. However, when cold...

 

On very cold mornings, it can take up to five tries to boot in. It sounds really wacky and no one seems to be working on this. Is it a voltage or temp-reporting issue, corrected by heated components? Is it because the mapped RAM reserved for video memory isn't being zero'd out properly, or is trying to use hard-coded timings that are slightly off when cold? Is it an internal USB device that waits and hangs the controller? I wish I knew where to begin with this problem, even just how to debug it a little so I can point someone in the right direction...

 

I know that when that screen occurs, everything stops dead. No hard drive activity, no more booting. It KP'd, froze, whatever. Nothing wakes it up, and your only option is to hold down the power button until it's off, then try again. EFI strings don't appear to help. QE, Hardware Acceleration, all resolutions seem to work great. Any ideas, anyone??

[slogican]

hi, Everybody!

 

unfortunately, I'm not the only one to face this. but for me it is for sure that my laptop starts normally on cold system. I'm booting in such a style for about a week already Today in the morning after unsuccessful reboot I put my laptop near opened window for 10 minutes - it is cold outside - and I booted ok. so, idea about timings seems good - this explains why it can be ok on cold for one and on warm for another. I tried SwitchResX (http://www.madrau.com/switchres/SwitchResX.zip), I thought it will help to hardcode display configuration, maybe it really can help, but I'm not an expert in hardware, and it seems that detailed settings should be configured to fix timings. I do not know where to get correct info about my display maybe those values are the same for all laptop LCDs?

 

any ideas, suggestions?

[slogican]

there is an idea, that display can return different EDID (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_display_identification_data) data in cold and warm states. or the data is the same, but either located in different memory locations, or searched in different ways by x3100 driver. so, the question is: how to make x3100 always get the same EDID? the idea comes from the fact, that normal boot with drivers shows the same (and I guess correct) EDID data always, and boot without drivers shows always some default data (since it is the same for me for build-in LCD and external CRT).

 

fix may be related either to EFI strings, in this case there is a question how to generate it properly (I think only string which defines EDID for display should be enough), or maybe this problem is solvable via DSDT?

 

I'm not an expert in both areas, unfortunately, so, maybe somebody can suggest any solution?

[Alex DeWolf]

Wow I thought I was the only one having this problem too.

I have an Asus R1E with the Intel X3100 and sometimes it comes up fine with QE/CI on first cold boot. Upon subsiquent boots I can only get blue screen or half blue, half white screen.....how can I help? I am considering going to Sabayon 4 Linux but I would really prefer OSX.

 

 

Alex