Holly Bostick wrote:
> All right-- I don't know what any of this means, but it is in fact much
> more information that what we previously had. What in the name of sanity
> is MergedFB, and where can we turn it off? Why is UseFBDev trying to
> turn *on* when your setting is *off* ?
For the record, my current xorg.conf device section looks like this:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "radeon"
VendorName "ATI Technologies Inc"
BoardName "RV350 [Mobility Radeon 9600 M10]"
Option "MergedFB" "Off"
Option "UseFBDev" "Off"
Option "MonitorLayout" "LVDS, CRT"
Option "DynamicClocks" "On"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "On"
Option "VGAAcess" "On"
Option "BIOSHotKeys" "On"
EndSection
Also, I have *no* DRI section at all...so maybe that needs to be removed
or commented out if it is actually causing the fatal error. It is
certainly useless
> Basically, the 'radeon' module (the kernel opensource drivers) are not
> able to initialize 3D hardware acceleration (afaik, the 'radeon' drivers
> cannot do this for the Mobility chipsets; you would need the fglrx
> drivers)-- and if you are using KDM or GDM or Entrance to start X
> (rather than just 'startx' from a console), you need this functionality
> (GNOME or KDE, ime, won't start without some form of acceleration, be it
> ATI, MESA or whatever).
Just a clarification here. The radeon driver can provide hardware
acceleration on Radeon 9200 and earlier boards (R250 chipsets and
below). R300 and above, including mobility, require the fglrx driver
for good 3D performance.
However the radeon driver fully supports the mobility chipsets for 2D
mode (I have Radeon 9600 mobility, M10/R350 chip), which is all that is
required for KDM/GDM/and most everything else. 3D screensavers, opengl
audio visualizations, and 3D games are the major things that don't run
worth a damn with the radeon driver.
> So I think the problem is in the kernel and X.org configs, for what it's
> worth. I also think that the radeon driver is the wrong one for you to
> be using, and you should be using the fglrx driver (check the release
> notes, but I'm pretty sure it's compatible with the Mobility now).
Yes, it will work with my M10 board. But some OpenGL apps still lockup
my machine, and you absolutely lose any capability of using software
suspend/resume. I happen to consider software suspend more important
for my laptop than (broken) 3D support, so I stick with the radeon
driver! I also build my system with "USE=-opengl", but that is _not_
the problem here.
> I have a sense that we've got the tiger by the wrong end, but don't have
> enough information to figure out which end is which :) .
I think you are on the right track...it seems to be a conflict between
the xorg.conf file, or kernel configuration. But I've tried to
duplicate the behavior, with and without dri, with and without the
UseFBDev/MergedFB options, and cannot do so. The best I can do is
generate errors about "failed to open framebuffer device" and "MergedFB
mode disabled". But X still starts. I can't generate any message about
"failed to load kernel module", or any other messages about the radeon
kernel module.
Fernando, you may want to try "X -configure", which will auto-generate a
configuration for you based on the things that X.org detects. You can
then test it with "X -config /root/xorg.conf.new". This mostly
configures things correctly for me, the only thing it gets wrong is that
I need "/dev/input/mice" instead of "/dev/mouse" in the pointer
configuration.
-Richard
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