iXce's blog » Fedora http://guillaume.segu.in/blog Stuff that doesn’t matter Mon, 28 Feb 2011 22:28:27 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 The Ghost TV problem http://guillaume.segu.in/blog/linux/238/the-ghost-tv-problem/ http://guillaume.segu.in/blog/linux/238/the-ghost-tv-problem/#comments Fri, 09 Jul 2010 19:14:55 +0000 iXce http://guillaume.segu.in/blog/?p=238 For months I have been having (temporary) freezes upon X/gdm login, sometimes even before that, lasting anywhere between 1 and 5 minutes (that’s on my Dell Latitude E4200). Actually, I could still move the cursor, and at times a panel widget would refresh, but nothing else. Logging on a tty and running top would show X.org eating 100% CPU (pretty much expected actually). Investigations of /var/log/Xorg.0.log revealed that X was continuously doing EDID probing because of an unknown TV1 monitor, while dmesg confirmed that something was going on with that mysterious TV1 output :
[ 12.924] (II) intel(0): Printing probed modes for output TV1
[ 15.065] (II) intel(0): Printing probed modes for output TV1
[ 15.477] (II) intel(0): Printing probed modes for output TV1
[ 15.892] (II) intel(0): Printing probed modes for output TV1
...

[drm] TV-1: set mode NTSC 480i 0
[drm] TV-1: set mode NTSC 480i 0
[drm] TV-1: set mode NTSC 480i 0
...

After spending quite a bunch of time trying to tell X to just ignore, I took the easy way and… switched to Ubuntu. But yesterday, I asked drago01 (maintainer of Compiz packages in Fedora) about the issue, and he immediately recognised the problem, calling it the “Ghost TV problem”. According to him and Adam Jackson (ajax), this is a screw up from hardware vendors. The graphics chipset thinks there is that TV plugged while there is definitely none.

Anyway, he also pointed me to the fix. 4 lines in xorg.conf and you’re done (this is actually my whole xorg.conf :p )

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "TV1"
Option "Ignore" "1"
EndSection

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