Black screen & System frozen before GDM (Intel Cherry Trail)

[prog-amateur]

Hi, it must be several months since I can't get Debian 10 started on my tablet. The French Debian forum tried to help me, but it seems difficult to find a solution, so I hope to find one here.

Problem :
After successful graphics installation, I reboot. GRUB appears and boots on Debian 10, then some messages scroll and then: black screen, the system is frozen (no reset possible). So this happens before the login screen.

Hardware :
This is a Xiaomi MiPad 2 tablet, with Intel Atom Cherry Trail X5-Z8500 processor (64-bit CPU & BIOS), 2GB RAM, and 64GB eMMC storage.

Since I can't boot, I have to take a picture. There is a "VGA compatible controller [...] Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 20)" driver supposed to be supported by Debian according to the members of the French forum :



Attempts :

• - recovery mode: same result
  - nomodeset: same result
  - nomodeset 2: login possible but in console mode
  - a modified kernel for a Surface Pro version Intel Atom X7-Z8700: same result
  - Ubuntu (only for testing) same result, but by adding either nomodeset or i915.modeset=0, you can start the tablet on GNOME (only in X11 session, no Wayland possible)

I should point out that several versions have been tested: Debian 10, sid, non-free firmware, etc.

Hypothesis :
One hypothesis from the French forum is that the i915 graphics module would cause the machine to crash for some unknown reason. What do you think?
Which graphics driver should I install on my tablet?

Thank you very much for your help, and take care with the Covid-19.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Since I can't boot, I have to take a picture.

If you "can't boot" then how did you arrive at the screen in the picture?

Looks to me like you can boot but can't load a graphical desktop, does adding 4 as a kernel command line parameter get you to a console login screen? If so then try installing the firmware-misc-nonfree package.

[prog-amateur]

Thank you. Sorry for using excessive language when talking about booting (not easy to translate from french), I hope the rest of my text was clear enough.

When you're talking about adding a 4 to the kernel parameter, should I just add "4" to it (that seems strange to me)? For example as :

Code: Select all

quiet splash 4

Thank you.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

should I just add "4" to it

Yes, that's right.

[prog-amateur]

Parameter 4 gives nothing successful (no graphical login).

I have tested 4 alone see the below error :


Then with nomodeset 4, just for testing (please be informed that "usb 1-1-port2: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?" error message are due to my USB hub) :


Please, do you have any idea from where I can investigate ? Thank you very much.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Parameter 4 gives nothing successful (no graphical login).

That parameter disables graphical login.

It looks like you can boot to a console (TTY) just fine so install the firmware-misc-nonfree package from there.

EDIT: if you haven't got an internet connection then download the .deb package using another device then transfer that to your Debian box and install it.