Details About MacBook Pro Display Problems
When I got my new MacBook Pro (early 2011), I got the program gfxCardStatus and it allows me to control the integrated/discrete graphics very nicely. What I noticed right away was that Unison and Twitterrific didn't like the discrete graphics, and so I emailed the respective authors and asked if they'd heard of this problem. Interestingly enough, they hadn't. Well... today I got a lot closer to figuring this out because one of the guys at Panic thought to ask about the console output.
Interestingly, it says:
4/19/11 3:47:05 AM Unison[1069] unknown error code: invalid display
4/19/11 3:47:05 AM [0x0-0x20020] Tue Apr 19 03:47:05 peabody.local Unison[1069]
.com.panic.Unison2[1069] <Error>: unknown error code: invalid display
Well now... isn's this interesting. Unison (and Twitterrific) are reporting that the AMD Radeon HD 6570M is an invalid disply. That's certainly something that you don't see every day. It also seems to remove the question of bad hardware from the table. If the libraries are seeing this as an invalid display, then it's the interpretation of what they are seeing that's the problem.
I sent this into both places, and we'll see what comes back. I'm hoping a fix for both of them.
[4/25] UPDATE: I got a response saying that an Apple engineer said it was the Flash Plugin. Since I'm not using Flash, that can't be it, but I did take a chance that it could be some plugin. So I removed the following plugins:
- AdobePDFViewer
- Cortona Plug-in
- O3D
- RealPlayer Plugin
- freewrl
- nsIQTScriptablePlugin.xpt
and when I restarted Safari, MarsEdit, and Chrome, the problem went away! So it's a plugin, allright, and one of these is bad. I don't really need any of these guys, so I'm leaving them all out, but it's nice to know I can find out the bad boy by putting it back in and seeing when things break.