Problems with new ATI card

[Phillip Neiswanger]

Hello,

I recently acquired an ATI FireGL 8800 card to replace my Voodoo 5500 card  
which had various problems when I last tried to do hardware rendering.  I  
am not having any luck with my new card either, so I have some questions.   
Before I get started I will note that I run FreeBSD 4.9 with the latest  
XFree86 4.4.0 packages and my cpu is an AMD Athlon classic running at  
850Mhz.

Here are my questions:

1.  Usually when a system boots the video cards displays some info about  
itself.  Right now my ATI card is silent.  Does anyone know how to get the  
card to display the info?

2.  When the system boots I like displaying one of those FreeBSD splash  
screens.  With the new card this is no longer happening.  I get the  
following messages during boot.

> Preloaded elf module "splash_bmp.ko" at 0xc03af0ec.
> Preloaded splash_image_data "/boot/splash.bmp" at 0xc03af190.
> VESA: v2.0, 131072k memory, flags:0x1, mode table:0xc02f7cc2 (1000022)
> VESA: ATI Fire GL 8800
> Pentium Pro MTRR support enabled
> splash_bmp: No appropriate video mode found
> module_register_init: MOD_LOAD (splash_bmp, c035f77c, 0) error 19

Why is the splash_bmp module unable to find an appropriate video mode?

3.  I am at this time unable to get hardware rendering working on my  
system.  According to the XFree86.0.log file, hardware rendering is  
disabled after the server attempts to open the file /dev/dri/Card0.  No  
such device exists.  I believe this is due to not having a drm driver  
loaded in the kernel.  However, there doesn't appear to be any drm modules  
in the 4.9 kernel source and the only prepackaged drm drivers I've found  
are in the package drm-kmod-0.9.6.  This package has linux drivers only  
and requires the linux module to be loaded.  Loading the radeon driver  
 from that package does not solve the problem.  The Card0 device still does  
not exist in the /dev/dri directory.  Aren't there any native 4.9 drm  
drivers?  A couple of years ago when I was working with my Voodoo such  
drivers existed.  Where can I find them now?  During the boot I load the  
drivers just prior to starting xdm.  Is this the appropriate time to load  
the modules?  I seem to remember reading someplace that it's better to get  
them loaded earlier.  Where do I do that?

That's my questions at the moment.  Looking forward to any helpful hints  
you might have.
--
phil


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