custom xinput driver / partial success then blank screen no GNOME/CentOS login

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alexanderfielding
Posts: 1
Joined: 2019/06/17 01:19:41

custom xinput driver / partial success then blank screen no GNOME/CentOS login

Post by alexanderfielding » 2019/06/22 20:28:38

Hi, Trying to resurrect a custom xinput driver working in Centos6.5 to run on Centos7 and beyond and need help figuring where to look for logs to show what's happening or ideas to fix, and especially figure out if this is an Xorg / CentOS / Gnome issue, or just driver code.

With Centos7.6.1810, have compiled driver against latest xorg-x11-server-devel.x86_64 library, installed, and see the /var/log/Xorg.0.log looks good for load, init, and open of driver, & same functional behavior as in older version of CentOS. :) BUT after the gray CentOS/Gnome screen first flashes up with the 7-background and spinner, it then disappears, the screen goes black, and the CentOS login page never displays no matter how long I wait.

When this happens, can Ctrl-Alt F2 to log in without the UI, but can't see any log msg to tell what's blocking CentOS/Gnome getting to the login screen. I tried Xorg -logverbose 7, and also reinstalling the CentOS ISO from scratch (same issue, so not apparent install glitch). What's happening??

My physical xinput is a simple serial port input device configured in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/xorg.conf that maps to /dev/ttyUSB0 through a USB-serial converter, and custom xinput driver does open this port as part of it's init/open and wants to keep it open. The Xorg.0.log shows the activity of the driver and seems to be working correctly reading data, but it's not useful with a blank black screen and CentOS/GNOME not presenting login screen. :(

For full disclosure, using all this via VMware player, and yes the port is assigned to the VM, and again - it works in the older versions of CentOS on the same player version.

After having spent a great deal of time reviewing x.org wiki, docs, and xinput driver updates for supporting ABI 24.1 starting to wonder if this has nothing with the driver code itself, but CentOS/GNOME which is why I'm asking here. The security, dmesg, boot logs haven't been any help to figure out what's the problem.

Suggestions or ideas please?


GNOME Shell 3.28.3

X.Org X Server 1.20.1
X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0
Build Operating System: 3.10.0-957.1.3.el7.x86_64

Build ID: xorg-x11-server 1.20.1-5.3.el7_6

compiled for 1.20.1, module version = #.#.#
Module class: X.Org XInput Driver
ABI class: X.Org XInput driver, version 24.1


Thanks,
Alex

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