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

[Da Rock]

On 12/20/11 14:33, Warren Block wrote:
> 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).
NP. I thought I was clear, but I'm not always coherent when I 
communicate (apparently... just ask the missus :) ).

The laptop is a compaq cq62 with a quad core phenom and a ATI 4200 
Radeon mobility GPU, as well as 6300 GPU.

The HTPC/desktop is a whitebox quad core phenom on a ASUS MB (not 100% 
sure which) with a NVidia onboard pcie GPU, and an ATI Radeon 3450. 
There could be yet another GPU on there, but I can't remember.

That system is running 8.x FBSD (1 or 2- can't quite remember), and the 
laptop I'm installing 9.0-RC3 on, with the view to using freebsd-update 
to RELEASE, because of the lack of Atheros 9285 support in 8.x (tried 
for hours, just couldn't get the bird to fly :( ).

 From what I understand now, having been able assimilate what has been 
discussed here and through google, it seems there is a conflict when 
dealing with multiple onboard GPUs. What exactly is the issue with 
getting an arbiter for FreeBSD? Aside from time, naturally.