Xorg error: New athlon laptop, radeonhd video - unable to load fbdev

[Warren Block]

On Tue, 20 Dec 2011, Da Rock wrote:

>> Some newer laptops have dual GPUs, an onboard Intel combined with one from 
>> another vendor for higher performance.  There's hot-switching between the 
>> two, but AFAIK it's not supported in FreeBSD.  There may be a BIOS option 
>> to disable one or the other.  There should still be two video outputs.
>> 
>> More than one video card at a time is a different issue, which is also 
>> unsupported on FreeBSD AFAIK:
>> (WW) VGA arbiter: cannot open kernel arbiter, no multi-card support
> It appears that it is something that needs to be resolved pretty quickly 
> then. The linux guys jumped on it quick as (I'm not ribbing by the way) - 
> probably their guys came across it sooner than BSD users.
>
> What has thrown me is the fact that I didn't even consider it as a problem 
> because I already had installed on a dual video system- ATI card and NVidia 
> onboard, both that will work on a linux system, and that FBSD has no problem 
> like this either; it just works. Weird...

It's difficult to tell what you're saying.  It's possible that multiple 
cards would work in some combinations, and just that the ones I tried 
did not.  Also, you're talking about two systems, a laptop and a 
desktop.  So it would be good to get some specifics, like laptop brand 
and model, whether the desktop dual-card setup worked with FreeBSD (and 
which version of FreeBSD).