freebsd7, radeon, xorg-server -> deadlock or so

[O. Hartmann]

On 02/10/10 03:41, Warren Block wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Feb 2010, Christof Schulze wrote:
>
>>> The situation is heavily unsatisfying, since one need an expensive
>>> AMD/ATi Radeon card to gain non-3D poor functionality, where a cheaper
>>> one should be do the same - but the cheaper ones don't work. Even if 
>>> one
>>> uses AMD64, the situattion is worse and I have no reason using
>>> Linux-driver on a FreeBSD box. Hope the situation gets cleared in the
>>> nearest future. It's a kind of deadlock. As I said, either spenig a lot
>>> of money for a working RV770 based AMD graphics card with poor
>>> functionality or nothing so far, since most smaller RV730 chips aren't
>>> supported properly by the most recent drivers.
>> To be fair - my ATI X300 has always worked. It is a cheap card with 
>> low-end
>> performance but it is perfectly fine for regular desktop-use.
>
> The older chipsets are better supported because the newer ones are, 
> well, newer.  If you haven't bought a video card yet, look at the 
> radeon(4x) man page first.
>
> Unfortunately, that doesn't help if you already have a newer card, or 
> a notebook.
>
> The other choices are Intel, where they don't have standalone video 
> cards, or nVidia, which has a full-featured blob and a really 
> bare-bones open driver.
>
> -Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA 

You said it. Alternatives? Barely. Having Intel-X58 based mainboards for 
our workstations, there is no onboard-Intel solution.
Speaking of nVidia - 64Bit FreeBSD-support isn't mature and, as far as I 
know, not yet arrived, but underway, but this is in the future and isn't 
subject of any consideration if I need to make my choices now.
Our department orders, in most cases, a bunch of systems completely 
equipted also with graphics boards. In many cases, there is no reason, 
economically, buying outdated graphics boards which are 5 years old and 
older, despite the fact that many shops do not offer them.

On Linux, most of those modern ATi/AMD video cards not working with X11 
on FreeBSD/amd64 work on Linux due to the fact most Linux derivates have 
a more modern OpenSource Xorg environment, including 'cutting' edge DRI 
and drivers. The alternative is to play with the well supported 32- and 
64-Bit blob even AMD/ATi offers for Linux.

Regards,
Oliver