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[Solved] With a little help from friends... asus_wmi and black laptop screen

Hi, everybody!

I gave my good old laptop to my wife and I ended with an ASUS EeePC 1025c that I got stored around. I was about to install Artix on it when I realized that the little thing is 32 bits. So I was forced to look for an alternative and I ended with some distro called hyperbola, which is also based on arch and is 8)  systemd free, yet it shares the debian philosophy about stability (using old and thoroughly tested packages).

Enough background story, the important matter is that I found a little problem when booting, at some point udev-trigger is launched by openrc and I figured out that it scans devices and decides which modules are needed in the kernel.  Screen (laptop display) goes black. However, HDMI is working and the laptop can be used with an external monitor. Everything else seems to work well, except for the built in screen.

So I tried with an interactive shell and prevented udev-triggers to start. Screen never shut down but there were no modules load for anything. I tried some modules individually, network, video, and stuff. They all worked fine. However, when I loaded some module call wmi, the screen went black again.

I have tried to change the backlight in /sys/class/backlight but it is at its maximum value already.

I am fully aware that this is not an Artix problem (well it could if we had a 32 bits version) but I hope any of you could help. I had googled the problem but I couldn't find anything that points into the right direction, there is the usual nonsense about sending parameters to the kernel using grub, but that didn't work. Also, srceen is fine at boot, so the problem has to be caused by some module (or modules), most likely wmi or something it launches.  I had also tried to launch the modules that depend on wmi, and they don't crash.

The video module is gma500_gfx, but it works fine if loaded manually.

dmesg and /var/log/messages show nothing unusual.

Thank you in advance.  8)

Re: With a little help from friends... asus_wmi and black laptop screen

Reply #1 –
Hi again,

for any of you who ran into the same problem. I managed to make it work by disabling udev-trigger and starting my working modules with the openrc init script for modules.

edit /etc/conf.d/modules and add a line like:
Code: [Select]
modules="foo bar"
where foo and bar are all your modules. The list can be long, but you can use line escapes (\)
Code: [Select]
modules="foo1 foo2 foo3 foo4 \
foo5 foo6 bar1 bar2 bar3 bar4"

Then, I fixed my init level. I had added modules and udev to the sysinit runlevel, dbus and elogind to the boot runlevel and acpid to the default one.

Thus, I was able to run X with xfce.

It does not solve the problem per se, but is a workaround.
Hope it can help someone.

Re: With a little help from friends... asus_wmi and black laptop screen

Reply #2 –
A little bit of selfe-piar :)
What do you think about trying out nldev+smdev instead of udev? Udev seems to do some background jobs not related to information in /sys
ARMtix

Re: With a little help from friends... asus_wmi and black laptop screen

Reply #3 –
I'll give it a try, and see what happens.

Re: With a little help from friends... asus_wmi and black laptop screen

Reply #4 –
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Kernel_module#Blacklisting
I think you could probably simplify your conf  (for the same effect) by blacklisting the wmi module.
Create /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf with the content:
blacklist wmi
and that should stop the wmi module being loaded. It's sometimes the case that there is more than one possible module for a task, they are given preference ratings for different hardware, sometimes the wrong one gets selected first just because your model is not listed properly, blacklisting makes it then fall back to the right module. I have no idea if that is the case here though.
I am impressed with your solution however, replacing the udev module loading altogether.

Re: With a little help from friends... asus_wmi and black laptop screen

Reply #5 –
Quote from: ####### – on
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Kernel_module#Blacklisting
I think you could probably simplify your conf  (for the same effect) by blacklisting the wmi module.
Create /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf with the content:
blacklist wmi
and that should stop the wmi module being loaded. It's sometimes the case that there is more than one possible module for a task, they are given preference ratings for different hardware, sometimes the wrong one gets selected first just because your model is not listed properly, blacklisting makes it then fall back to the right module. I have no idea if that is the case here though.
I am impressed with your solution however, replacing the udev module loading altogether.

I did try that but without the .conf and it didn't work. I will check again.

Thanks for the help.

[Edit] I indeed tried that and worked OK.
Thank you.