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

Robert Noland rnoland at FreeBSD.org
Wed Feb 10 12:17:08 UTC 2010


On Tue, 2010-02-09 at 20:41 -0700, 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.

radeon IS the best choice.  They (amd) are reasonably supportive of our
efforts, provide docs and code.  Intel also does, but they are far less
interested in supporting anything except linux with their latest and
greatest code.

As for older cards, as things change, the older cards get less and less
testing and can sometimes have issues.  I only have one AGP based radeon
handy (8500DV), but for PCI-E, I have representations from every chip
family, from x600 up to HD4650.  Basically, r300, r500, r600.  I do not
have one of the IGP models, which are slightly different (rv480, rs690)
but AFAIK, we resolved the issues with those chips and drm like a year
ago.

Warren and Adam Kirchof have also always been really good about
providing testing on their fleet of radeons.

A lockup without drm is almost certainly a GPU crash as there isn't any
real kernel interaction.  If you can ssh into the box and collect some
info it might help to identify the issue.  GPU crashes can be tricky to
isolate though, since you really don't know where the instruction that
is causing the issue is coming from.  Dropping back to a really simple
environment and slowly working forward to find out what triggers the
issue is usually the best way.

robert.

> 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
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-stable at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-stable-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
-- 
Robert Noland <rnoland at FreeBSD.org>
FreeBSD



More information about the freebsd-stable mailing list