I know that this topic has come up many times in the past, but here goes. I'm one of the poor schleps with a XPRESS 200M in my Compaq laptop. The open-source driver doesn't support it, and the latest fglrx driver just hangs upon X startup.
So... I want to try to fix this. From the DRI mail threads/bug reports that I've read so far, it appears as if the memory controller is radically different than the other ATI cards.
There was a post in early September ( http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=dri-devel&m=115713477422878&w=2 ), describing how to support this with the opensource driver.
1) Get an ATI proprietary driver running on the machine. (DONE: fglrx: 8.24.8 & FC5)
2) Dump MC registers/record initialization sequence (Working on it.)
3) Build a custom Xorg webserver with intialization matching the ATI proprietary driver (and will allow DRM to be installed)
4) Fixs bugs & goto 3
5) Profit.
Questions
1) (I'm a complete Xorg/DRI/Mesa developer newbie.)
What specific parts of the system have to be changed? Is this a DRM driver issue? Is it something in Mesa? Is it something in the X.org server? (Even better, which files should I look at? ) (radeon_display.c from xf86-video-ati/src looks promising.)
2) What tools are best to dump the radeon register information?
I've used radeon_dump to get things after I started up, but it only gives me the final state of the registers. I stumbled upon another dumper here: " http://people.freedesktop.org/~glisse/". (I think that this will track register initialization through-out the startup process).
Are these the best tools to use?
3) Finally, where is the best place to discuss the ATI development/ask questions?
Is there an overview of how radeons are laid out? I've looks through some of the DRI documentation ( http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/Documentation), but none seem to reference the radeon specifically.
NOTE: I don't know if this is typical of most graphics cards, but the "hyper-memory" on the XPress cards seems to be more than just a software manager. According to ( http://www.ati.com/technology/HyperMemory_Whitepaper.pdf), there is also a PCI express auxilary channel that can shuffle things back and forth from the VPU to memory.
Cheers & Thanks,
--Phil
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