Dear Maintainer,

I installed Debian 7.0 on a Thinkpad R60 with an ATI Radeon Mobility X1400. On boot, the screen turned blank after I was asked to give my disk encryption password. Without graphical output, the system was not usable.

Both booting with radeon.modeset=0 and editing the file /etc/modprobe.d/radeon-kms.conf (replacing “options radeon modeset=1” with “options radeon modeset=0”) fixes the problem.

I suggest detecting the presence of an ATI Radeon Mobility X1400 graphics card and disabling KMS when installing Debian.

(Additional information deleted since I am reporting from a different system.)

Dear Maintainer,

I think the issue is still not fixed and may just have become worse.
It can even happen before the disk encryption password is asked for.

A possible workaround is to:

1. boot with radeon.modeset=0
2. use the vesa driver (explicitly configure this in /etc/X11/xorg.conf)

Doing this, one can get a usable X11 session without acceleration.

I have blacklisted the radeon module at boot and then used modprobe to
load it while X11 is running. I have redirected dmesg output to a file.

The results seem to suggest that this issue is a (kernel?) driver bug …

Dear Maintainer,

updating the Thinkpad R60 BIOS made modesetting with the radeon driver work;
after updating the BIOS I did not need any additional Linux cmdline options.

Lenovo Thinkpad R60 BIOS Update 2.23 CD image: file size 5273600 bytes
SHA256 e6aaf32ee8999eaeb677b2e34515d5c0edda7b5a2e3e475213456bf91932cfa7
https://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbbs/mobiles/7cuj26uc.iso

Lenovo Thinkpad R60 BIOS Update 2.23 Release Notes: file size 17545 bytes
SHA256 bdb48dc1bf54b6ea26774912d56114fba15e9d6e17f19dedfa35bd5b186fed8e
https://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbbs/mobiles/7cuj26us.txt

I burned the CD image to a physical CD and then booted from it to update.
I believe this bug report can be closed – should I report somewhere else?