Carousel is a LIE!

Vishnu ate my laptop

01 Nov 2007

Dude, my laptop screen just turned blue. I'd booted into OpenBSD (4.2) and was trying to figure out how to turn off the audible bell. I'd gone from X to a virtual console to see if the problem happened there (it did), then tried ctrl-alt-f5 to get back to X.

My laptop screen turned from black with white text to grey with grey text to light blue with dark blue text, over the course of a minute or so. I thought I'd suddenly borked the LCD screen, but when I rebooted to Debian it was all fine. Just tried switching to a console, then back to X (alsoin Debian), and that's fine too. Bizarre.

Just checked the logs in OpenBSD and found a series of entries like this:

Nov  1 16:47:17 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 0 is bound
Nov  1 16:47:17 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 1 is bound
Nov  1 16:47:17 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 2 is bound
Nov  1 16:47:17 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 3 is bound
Nov  1 16:47:17 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 4 is bound
Nov  1 16:47:24 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 5 is bound
Nov  1 16:47:24 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 6 is bound
Nov  1 16:47:24 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 7 is bound
Nov  1 16:47:24 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 8 is bound
Nov  1 16:47:24 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 9 is bound
Nov  1 16:47:31 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 10 is bound
Nov  1 16:47:31 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 11 is bound
Nov  1 16:47:31 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 12 is bound
Nov  1 16:47:31 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 13 is bound
Nov  1 16:47:31 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 14 is bound
Nov  1 16:47:38 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 15 is bound
Nov  1 16:47:38 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 16 is bound
Nov  1 16:47:38 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 17 is bound
Nov  1 16:47:38 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 18 is bound
Nov  1 16:47:38 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 19 is bound

Very weird. On the bus, so Googling that'll have to wait. Although I do have the code on that partition…here we go: says it's the AGPIOC_RELEASE ioctl for agp. Aha! Maybe I'll explain money laundering while I'm at it.

And btw, here's a memo for the world: if you're on the toilet, don't take a phone call. It's really not that important.

Update, October 15 2008: Still happening with OpenBSD 4.3. And for the record, this is a Dell C300 laptop.

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