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I'm normally a "just fix it myself by googling it" kind of person, but this one has me pretty stumped. A little background info:

I have a farm of Dell R720s, each with 4 SAS SSDs, and two Nvidia K20Xs. The system's main video output is (apparently) a Matrox SVGA affair. These are currently running Windows Server 2012 (oh, the horror, I know) and I'm trying to migrate these to Ubuntu. Which version? Any version. 14.04 Desktop LTS, 14.04 Server LTS, 16.04 Desktop LTS, 16.04 Server LTS.

In all cases, the install proceeds sucessfully, nice pretty GUI, purple/red screen SVGA. Then when it's done and reboots, dumped to terminal. The xstart apparently dumps out with a seg fault.

I've tried removing lightgm, installing,. reinstalling, repairing gdm, starting from scratch with unity-desktop etc... all same result. When booting, the purple screen shows up and the display starts flashing a few times (seg faults!), then I'm dumped to terminal. After fighting with this for quite a while my suspicion is the dm (whichever I try and use) is getting really confused about the archaic, ancient matrox (primary) display adapter and the two (headless, 21st century) Tesla K20x's...

So, two part question: (1) what logs would you folks find helpful to help me resolve this issue? The x server init is seeingf all three adpters then bombing out with a segfault... and (2) has anyone here dealt with a Ubuntu server system with two headless GPU cards and a 20th century primary video display system?

Will Gaddy
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1 Answers1

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I work for Dell. I have seen issues like the one you are describing when you attach a monitor to the server that supports resolutions beyond those supported by the iDRAC8 on that generation of servers. If you don't want to disconnect the monitor or disable local monitor in the iDRAC Virtual Console settings here is what you can do to work around the issue.

  1. First, to get the system to boot, power cycle the system and at the grub boot menu press e to edit the entry and remove this line:

    gfxmode $linux_gfx_mode

    Then press Ctrl+X to boot.

  2. Once the system boots run sudo vi /etc/default/grub and uncomment/modify this line to limit the VGA output to iDRAC8 supported resolutions:

    GRUB_GFXMODE=1280x1024x32,1152x864x32,1024x768x32,800x600x32

  3. Run

    sudo update-grub

    to incorporate the changes into the Grub configuration.

Now the system should boot without issue.

See Also:

David Foerster
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Lee Ballard
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