DRI problems with ati/radeon on stable/7 r203425

[Robert Noland]

On Mon, 2010-02-08 at 20:41 -0800, David Wolfskill wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 08, 2010 at 11:29:44AM -0700, Warren Block wrote:
> > ...
> > >And the xdm login banner finally showed up; I'd estimate that was around
> > >20 minutes of idle time before that happened.
> > 
> > Does it behave differently if you disable xdm in /etc/ttys and manually 
> > startx?
> 
> OK; I tried disabling xdm & starting X via xinit, at which point I
> received a reminder that I had didn't have permission to move the X.org
> log files around in /var/log.  I could pursue that further if it's
> really wanted, but the suggestion below appears to have had a more
> dramatic effect....
> 
> > Oh, and you should probably have Option "AccelMethod" "EXA" in the 
> > driver section of xorg.conf.
> 
> Ok; I hadn't uncommented any of the "acceleration" lines in the file --
> I tend to leave things at default values unless I have a known reason to
> change them (or I'm too bored, which doesn't happen often).  :-}
> 
> Merely explicitly disabling the "NoAccel" option(!) appears to have had
> no particular effect -- I was able to get a locakup (or extremem
> slowdown) with it.
> 
> Doing that in conjunction with specifying EXA as the AccelMethod does
> appear to avoid the problem -- I tried at least a dozen times, and
> there's been no failure.  On the other hand, animated displays sometimes
> "glitch" rather more often with EXA than with teh default (XAA).

XAA is old, crufty and unmaintained.  It really shouldn't be used on
anything, though it works better with some drivers than others.

robert.

> Thats'a bit surprising to me, as the laptop in question isn't especially
> recent -- most of it dates from a few years ago.  (It's a Latitude C840
> chassis with a few parts from earlier Inspiron 8200s, and a few that
> were parts purchased for it.)
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Peace,
> david
-- 
Robert Noland <rnoland at FreeBSD.org>
FreeBSD