[ltp] Z61m, ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility X1400, Debian Sid

[Alex Deucher]

On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 2:18 AM, Philipp Kern <pkern@debian.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Tue, Feb 08, 2011 at 01:09:21PM +0100, Gijs Hillenius wrote:
>> Debian Sid today is making life hard for my Xorg server.
>
> sadly KMS is broken with that chipset. =A0I've got the same and I'm sure =
there's
> a bug open about it, but it seems nobody can do anything about it[0]. =A0=
The GPU
> loses somehow its synchronization over time. =A0(It completely locks up a=
fter
> some time on mine, so it's not just the flickering.)

KMS has been reported working just fine for other users on that
laptop, and I have r3xx pcie chips working just fine here.  Have you
tried any distros other than debian?  They tend to use very old
kernels.  How about a recent vanilla kernel?  If you are having
issues, please file a bug.  Bugs that aren't reported aren't fixed:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org

>
>> I'm trying to weed through the bug reports and google results, I find
>> hints to boot with for instance
>>
>> nomodeset or
>> radeon.agpmode=3D1 or
>> radeon.agpmode=3D-1
>>
>> and check the settings in /etc/modprobe/radeon-kms.conf
>>
>> (currently KMS is enabled. If I disable it, X won't start).
>>
>> However I'm not entirely sure what any of these 'tweaks' do. Currently,
>> X starts but every now and then it will start to become unusable
>> (scrolling so fast, it will make me pass out if I look at it too long).
>
> I'm currently running squeeze and there is no problem if you use the rade=
on
> driver without the new modesetting function, yet. =A0radeon.modeset=3D0 o=
n the
> kernel commandline works for me. =A0The "tweak" is just deactivating a ne=
w
> kernel facility that can do the resolution switching in the kernel instea=
d
> of the X server. =A0As long as it's not needed by the drivers yet there's=
 no
> harm in turning it off, except that the virtual consoles don't look as
> nifty as they do with KMS. =A0But then that's for a minority anyway, I gu=
ess.

Please report the bugs so we can fix them rather than just disabling
kms.  No one is actively working on ums anymore, so we'd like to make
sure kms as working as well as possible.  Besides high res consoles,
kms also enables a unified memory manager and dri2 support which
provides much faster 3D acceleration, more OpenGL features (fbos,
OpenGL 2.x support, etc.) and working 3D in conjunction with
composite.

Alex

>
> Kind regards
> Philipp Kern
>
> [0] I gave up some time ago and didn't record the bug number. =A0I still =
try to
> =A0 =A0track mainline and retry KMS from time to time, but it never impro=
ved.
>
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