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

[Robert Noland]

On Wed, 2010-02-10 at 10:47 +0000, O. Hartmann wrote:
> 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 economically, buying outdated graphics boards which are 5 years old and 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.

We use more or less, the same code that linux does.  We don't have
KMS/TTM yet, but generally, I think you will probably find more issues
using those than you will with the slightly older driver.  If you are
having issues with the radeon driver, then you need to report that to me
and be willing to provide details.  The guys at AMD are pretty willing
to offer support where needed, but I can't look into issues that I don't
know about.  The very newest radeons still aren't supported in any code,
but all HD4xxx and below should be.  I don't have the time that I have
in the past, but I'll try and sort out issues as I can.

robert.

> Regards,
> Oliver
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-- 
Robert Noland <rnoland at FreeBSD.org>
FreeBSD