Can't start X anymore: Caught signal 6 (Abort trap). Server aborting

[pollito_cpc]

Hi there,

I'm hoping someone can help me. X won't start on my netbook any more for some reason. I suspect it may have happened after I updated the packages a week or so ago as I an't think of any other change I made that could have caused this.

Fatal server error:
[ 52.530] (EE) Caught signal 6 (Abort trap). Server aborting

I've got kern.vty=vt in my /boot/loader.conf and kld_list="i915kms" in my /etc/rc.conf and the screen still changes text mode resolution when loading the KMS driver as it did before. I have also rebuilt graphics/drm-kmod and its dependencies from ports, but no change.

In case it helps, I've pasted my dmesg and Xorg log files into pastebin. The latter appears to show X falling back from driver to driver, but I'm not sure why.

My user is a member of the video group (as well as wheel), and I have tried this with a different user too, which gave the same result. I've reinstalled Xorg and its dependencies, and have purged the /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ directory in between, but still no dice.

I'm using 13.1-RELEASE-p3 with the stock GENERIC kernel on amd64, and other than building drm-kmod as a test, I am using packages. This was happening before I updated from 13.1-RELEASE-p2 to 13.1-RELEASE-p3 yesterday.

As always any help would be greatly appreciated as I'm completely out of ideas!

 

[Voltaire]

I am anything but a specialist in this field. I switched from a new Nvidia card to integrated Intel graphics and then back to another Nvidia card. What I think I've done is leave the old settings that worked for the integrated Intel graphics but with a number sign/hash in front of it.

I only see kld_list="/boot/modules/i915kms.ko" listed for me in /etc/rc.conf

So you can try with just this setting and remove all other Intel GPU settings from /boot/loader.conf and /etc/rc.conf

Perhaps the following topics can help you:

i915kms.ko driver problem

After upgrade from 12 to 12.1 amd64 With kernel.old system boots to the GUI ( mate desktop ) rc.conf kld_list="/boot/modules/i915kms.ko" i915kms.ko and drm.ko are loaded also is loaded driver i915_kbl_dmc_ver1_04_bin.ko 2. But when I do upgrade from 12.0 to 12.1 with this rc.conf system hangs...

forums.freebsd.org

i915kms kernel module causing freezes on FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE

freebsd-questions.freebsd.narkive.com

I had a similar problem with X appearing to hang. In my case, I had to
specify the full path:

$ grep kms /etc/rc.conf
kld_list="/boot/modules/i915kms.ko"

...in order to load the i915kms from the port graphics/drm-fbsd12.0-kmod
rather than the one from the kernel. Yes, I had to build the port, not
just install the pkg.

Caveat: Matt just upgraded to 13.0; I'm still on 12.2-RELEASE-p4 on
account of sloth. I'm guessing Matt probably needs
graphics/drm-fbsd13-kmod.

 

[pollito_cpc]

Voltaire many thanks for your reply. I looked again at the Xorg log and it was saying that it couldn't find the intel driver. So I checked the packages, and found no sign of xf86-video-intel. I installed the package and, viola, everything worked again.

I'm quite confused because I'm sure that I didn't install this package myself when I set the machine up a few months ago, and I'm 99.99% I didn't drunk-uninstall it or anything like that so it remains a mystery!

 

[roper]

I've encountered the same after not long after updating the ports collection. Recent versions of mesa have dropped support to the i915 driver. So that drm-510-kmod pulls in mesa-dri and mesa-libs and then it's a pickle. The xf86-video-intel driver and modesetting driver work but unfortunately not quite so well as the accelerated driver. You'll see llvmpipline in your xorg.0.log where i915 used to be. It's fine for most things but on my tiny J1900 media player it now drops enough 1080p frames as to make movies unwatchable. I've rolled back a freebsd-upgrade and am currently attempting to regress the ports, no poudriere here unfortunately.

 

[pollito_cpc]

roper Thank you for confirming that I'm not going mad - I was beginning to wonder! ? I have noticed a difference when playing games since I installed the xf86-video-intel driver, although YouTube is still fine on the machine which is about as much video as I do. I created a /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/driver-intel.conf and set the Accel option to true so maybe this would help you too?

I have some general questions for anyone on the forum who might be reading this, and may be able to help with next steps:

What's the solution to mesa dropping support for i915? Is it possible that the later version of the driver is included in xf86-video-intel or even in another port? It seems nuts that the plug is suddenly pulled on entire chip sets without any warning, just because upstream support was removed. Do we even know why it was removed?