Hello.
I use Alpine Linux 3.21.2 on a Dell Latitude E6510 with Intel integrated
graphics and a Dell E-Dock II docking station with an external monitor.
Alpine is configured with syslinux and eudev, and has the Intel hardware
drivers installed.
When I boot the laptop, the built-in display goes blank after the Alpine
Linux boot countdown and the first few boot messages. This black screen
continues through the OpenRC messages and my display manager login
window. At this point I can't use any key combinations to get the
display back.
The only way to see anything is to connect my laptop to my docking
station. If I dock the laptop at any point during or after the boot
process, the picture immediately shows on the external monitor. If I
un-dock the laptop any point after this, it switches to the primary
display and I can see everything there fine, both the boot console and
X. Only on first boot, un-docked, is this an issue.
This all started after my recent upgrade from 3.19 to 3.21 following the
wiki here:
https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Upgrading_Alpine_Linux_to_a_new_release_branch.
Prior to that everything worked as expected. To troubleshoot, I enabled
verbose logging on startup for inittab, syslinux conf, and OpenRC. The
only relevant message I noticed was "Waiting for uevents to be
processed" is the last message displayed before my built-in display
blanks. I can provide more logs here if they're relevant.
I found some similar discussion on the bug tracker here:
https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/issues/6723. But this
issue is much older and I don't think it's relevant. The fix documented
there didn't help either. I didn't see any relevant mailing list
archives for this issue when I searched.
I think it has something to do with my kernel parameters or device
driver configuration, or the events that get triggered for my devices.
Where should I proceed next to continue troubleshooting this issue?
Thank you for your time,
Adam