Radeon 8500 LE 128mb

[Trevor S. Cornpropst]

On Thursday 18 September 2003 04:02, David L wrote:
> Has anyone had any success with dual head on this card ( that is, one
> monitor on the vga output and another on the dvi output )?
>
> usually if I do pciconf -v -l with one monitor hooked up only and to the
> vga port, I get
>
> drm0 at pci1:0:0:  class=0x030000 card=0x00041681 chip=0x514c1002 rev=0x00
> hdr=0x00
>     vendor   = 'ATI Technologies'
>     device   = 'R200 Radeon 8500 / 8500LE'
>     class    = display
>     subclass = VGA
>
> as you can see it has the drm driver attached.
>
> If I start with both monitors plugged in I get this:
>
> none0 at pci1:0:0:  class=0x030000 card=0x00041681 chip=0x514c1002 rev=0x00
> hdr=0x00
>     vendor   = 'ATI Technologies'
>     device   = 'R200 Radeon 8500 / 8500LE'
>     class    = display
>     subclass = VGA
>
> what happened with the driver? The text in the console also looked blurry.
> If I go to startx  I get a no screens found error.
>
> Does anyone know about this, had any experience, now where to look, or
> wether this is more a freebsd current type question?
>
> Any help whatsoever would be greatly appreciated, I really want to get dual
> screen happening
>
> Thanks in advance
>
> David
>

David,

You are not the only one having problems with ATI cards. I communicated with 
ATI for over a month to get the issue resolved to no avail. ATI needs to get 
their head out of their ass (I hope they are listening)!!!

Here is the situation as I understand it:

The XFree86 driver fails to initialize dual ported ATI cards correctly, on 
certain lines of chipsets (I have an ATI FireGL X1 Dual DVI based on the R300 
chip). The X driver needs to initialize the ports on the card in order to 
bring up a display but a review of the driver code reveals there seems to be 
some confusion as to how this is done. I don't blame the XFree86 developers 
for this. ATI keeps this information pretty close and their claims of 
supporting X86 and open source are worthless (hope they are still listening).

ATI provides a binary Linux driver that is specific to versions of X86, the 
linux kernel, and glibc. Seems to me they could do better than that. At the 
end of my long communciations with ATI, they are not interested in supporting 
FreeBSD as NVidia does. Anyway, with the ATI Linux kernel driver, one is able 
to use the ATI provided X driver which correctly initializes the ports on the 
card and get full functionality of the hardware they paid for (my card cost 
over three hundred dollars).

I tried contacting the X86 developers and Eric Anholt (FreeBSD DRI) with no 
success. Maybe if enough people make enough noise we can get something done. 
I looked at porting the Linux kernel driver to FreeBSD but that is out of my 
skillset and time at the moment. I am willing to assist with development and 
testing if someone can provide some guidance.

Ok, I'm done ranting now. You may still be able to get the card going by 
playing with your XF86Config file. I never found any decent guidance for dual 
head (Xinerama) set ups. A google search for ATI and Xinerama will turn up 
configs that other people have gotten to work. There seems to be a little 
more luck with the R200 chips. The code block for the R300 is essentially 
empty.

Try unloading the radeon.ko and running pciconf. I believe you should two 
entries for an ATI video device in the output. I am not a PCI guru but this 
may be dependent on how the card is architected so maybe you might only see 
one. I can't get to my machine with this card right now, thanks Isabel. If 
you are interested, I can forward my configs to you.

Trevor