So I ran into the situation where I was getting a black screen when gdm should be starting up. I was not able to switch to a different terminal but was able to ssh into the machine. I found the following crash dump in dmesg:
[ 13.473227] Pid: 1339, comm: Xorg Tainted: P 2.6.35-28-generic #49-Ubuntu 0RY206/Inspiron 531 [ 13.473229] RIP: 0010:[] [ ] _nv026788rm+0x44/0x176 [nvidia] [ 13.473529] RSP: 0018:ffff88012a6ddaa8 EFLAGS: 00010282 [ 13.473531] RAX: ffff88012a7b0000 RBX: ffff88012a7ba000 RCX: 0000000000000001 [ 13.473533] RDX: ffff88012a7b0000 RSI: 0000000000000016 RDI: ffff88012db0e000 [ 13.473535] RBP: ffff88012a77df68 R08: ffff88012db20000 R09: ffff88012a7a6800 [ 13.473537] R10: 00000000ffffffff R11: 0000000000000077 R12: ffff88012a7be000 [ 13.473539] R13: ffff88012db0e000 R14: ffff88012a7b0000 R15: ffff88012e6ae400 [ 13.473542] FS: 00007f61416b4840(0000) GS:ffff880001f00000(0000) knlGS:0000000000000000 [ 13.473544] CS: 0010 DS: 0000 ES: 0000 CR0: 000000008005003b [ 13.473546] CR2: ffffffffa0e44082 CR3: 000000012d049000 CR4: 00000000000006e0 [ 13.473548] DR0: 0000000000000000 DR1: 0000000000000000 DR2: 0000000000000000 [ 13.473550] DR3: 0000000000000000 DR6: 00000000ffff0ff0 DR7: 0000000000000400 [ 13.473553] Process Xorg (pid: 1339, threadinfo ffff88012a6dc000, task ffff88012a6896e0) [ 13.473555] Stack: [ 13.473556] ffffc90005447000 ffff88012db0e000 ffff88012a77dfe8 ffff88012a7be000 [ 13.473559] <0> ffffc90005447000 ffffffffa05d02a2 ffff88012a7b0000 ffff88012e6ae400 [ 13.473563] <0> ffff88012db0e000 ffffc90005447000 ffff8801371c3000 ffffffffa05d1259 [ 13.473567] Call Trace: [ 13.473875] [ ] ? _nv002159rm+0x213/0x256 [nvidia] [ 13.474182] [ ] ? _nv002152rm+0x407/0x671 [nvidia] [ 13.474491] [ ] ? rm_init_adapter+0x89/0xfd [nvidia] [ 13.474801] [ ] ? nv_kern_open+0x5ae/0x760 [nvidia] [ 13.474808] [ ] ? chrdev_open+0x10a/0x200 [ 13.474811] [ ] ? chrdev_open+0x0/0x200 [ 13.474815] [ ] ? __dentry_open+0xe5/0x330 [ 13.474818] [ ] ? security_inode_permission+0x1f/0x30 [ 13.474822] [ ] ? nameidata_to_filp+0x54/0x70 [ 13.474825] [ ] ? finish_open+0xe8/0x1d0 [ 13.474828] [ ] ? dput+0xdf/0x1b0 [ 13.474831] [ ] ? do_last+0x86/0x460 [ 13.474834] [ ] ? do_filp_open+0x21b/0x660 [ 13.474837] [ ] ? alloc_fd+0x10a/0x150 [ 13.474840] [ ] ? do_sys_open+0x69/0x170 [ 13.474843] [ ] ? sys_open+0x20/0x30 [ 13.474847] [ ] ? system_call_fastpath+0x16/0x1b [ 13.474849] Code: 00 ba 00 00 00 00 be 3d 00 00 00 41 ff 55 20 48 89 c3 b9 01 00 00 00 ba 00 00 00 00 be 16 00 00 00 4c 89 ef 41 ff 55 20 49 89 c6 <48> 8b 05 13 e0 bd 00 48 89 45 10 8b 05 11 e0 bd 00 89 45 18 0f [ 13.474874] RIP [ ] _nv026788rm+0x44/0x176 [nvidia] [ 13.475172] RSP [ 13.475174] CR2: ffffffffa0e44082 [ 13.475177] ---[ end trace d0d65b22157fbf8d ]--- [ 20.970009] eth0: no IPv6 routers present [ 71.510022] Clocksource tsc unstable (delta = -81563436 ns)
After quite a bit of searching without any luck I tried to remember what I had done prior. This had actually happened previously and I ended up reinstalling Ubuntu to fix the problem. It was very disheartening when it happened again. I did recall that it had started happening shortly after I had setup this computer for dev work on Chromium. This problem had also started occurring after setting up to work on Chromium. One of the more invasive packages that I had installed is the gold replacement ld. Since part of the NVidia drivers involves building (I assume) kernel modules I thought this might be part of the problem - AND IT WAS! :-)
For now I just uninstalled binutils-gold, reinstalled the NVidia driver, and now X is starting up just fine.
Hope this helps someone else out there.
