recovering from the 6.3 xorg mess

[peter stern]

On Mon, 17 Mar 2008, Brad Pitney wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 5:29 AM, peter stern <pstern at 65north.com> wrote:
>> I'd appreciate suggestions on how to get a working xorg from the mess 6.3
>>  shipped with. I've been using FreeBSD since 2.2 and have never had much
>>  trouble with it until the 6 branch was released. My hardware is pretty
>>  generic Intel brand D865 motherboard, matrox g550 video. I don't customize
>>  the kernel. I do clean installs not upgrades.
>>
>
> have you tried without an xorg.conf?
>
>>  The xorg in 6.3 doesn't install much in the way of required drivers. I got
>>  the mouse and keyboard drivers installed and also the mga driver. I have
>>  run xorgconfig to create what seems like a working xorg.conf. Startx
>>  brings up twm but only in 640x480. I cannot change modes. And yes, I have
>>  mode lines defined. If I put the correct horizontal and vertical scan
>>  rates in for my Viewsonic PT810 monitor, I get a screen display with lines
>>  precessing through it. xdm gives the same result.
>>
>>  I have tried the other suggestions on configuring X in the FreeBSD
>>  handbook, including creating a basic xorg.conf. It tests okay but only in
>>  640x480 and it has no modelines in the .conf. Adding modelines doesn't fix
>>  the problem.
>>
>
> I suspect modelines won't help and there might be a bug in xf86-video-mga?
>
>>  The initial install was done by sysinstall under the predefined
>>  xdeveloper selection. I tried reinstalling xorg from ports by running make
>>  deinstall and make reinstall but with no change in behavior.
>>
>
> what about installing just base then using an up-to-date ports?
>
>>  My hardware has no problems running Slackware 12 or Openbsd 4.2. Under
>>  those OSs, X11 works fine and configures without problems.
>>
>>  What has happened to quality control in the FreeBSD release?
>
> is it really a FreeBSD issue?
>
>>
>>  peter
>>

I tried firing x up without an xorg. I get a 640x480 screen that appears 
otherwise normal with no precessing. No other modes are available.

I took the drive and put it in a computer with an nvidia GX400, pointed 
the xorg.conf to the nv driver. X started up without a problem.

It does appear the problem is with the FreeBSD mga driver. I have a G550 
with vga and dvi outputs but I am only using the vga output.

The quality control issue I mentioned has to do with why the default 
install for x-developer did not install the device drivers for 
input-keyboard and input-mouse. That would seem to be a pretty basic 
problem and should have been caught by quality control. If you look at the 
x devices directory, very little is in there. I had to manually add the 
mouse and keyboard devices, from packages, to get x to even start up.

What is the trick for determining the driver version? When I try to 
compare the Xorg.0.log from OpenBSD 4.2, Slackware 12 and FreeBSD 6.3, the 
mga and xorg versions differ completely. The x.org site is not much help 
on the mga driver version issue either.

The mga man page references the mga_hal binary available from matrox 
however the only reference I could find on that site for it dates back to 
2001 and there is no info on how to use it. It is not clear it is needed 
for just basic output from a G550.

Getting x running should not be this hard.

Thanks,

peter