recovering from the 6.3 xorg mess

[peter stern]

I am bringing this topic over from the freebsd-stable list where I started 
the thread. I am hoping to learn more about what went wrong in my case and 
what if anything can be done to fix it.

A little background. I have been using FreeBSD since 2.2. present hardware 
is an Intel brand D865 motherboard, Matrox G550 AGP video card, only 
using the vga port. Viewsonic PT810 monitor

This hardware ran X without problems under FreeBSD 6.0, 6.1 and 6.2. It 
runs X fine under OpenBSD 4.3 and Slackware 12.0

1. Clean install of 6.3 using the X-developer distribution.

2. cvsup the stable branch

3. make and install buildkernel using GENERIC

4. make and install world

5. configure X using xorgconfig

6. quick inspection of resulting xorg.conf looks fine

7. startx, with no customized .xinitrc, x won't even start up

8. tracked problem down to no installed input-keyboard, input-mouse or 
video-mga devices. Only found a very minimal set of devices in the base 
install.

9. installed missing devices from pkg

10. x starts up but video is hosed, scan rates all wrong no matter what 
gets put in the xorg.conf. modelines don't work. can't change modes from 
keyboard. lines precessing through display, unuseable desktop

11. another freebsd user suggested using xandr. Desktop scan problem can 
be controlled to an extent by xandr but it doesn't report all the true 
refresh rates and won't accept manually entered rates. Looks like the mga 
device doesn't support many higher resolution screens with refresh rates 
above 60hz. I guess, so much for CRT monitors capable of higher refresh 
rates.

12. took hard drive to computer with nvidia GForce 2 MX400. pointed 
xorg.conf to the nv device and x started normally. resolutions can be 
changed from keyboard.

13. problem would seem to be partly in the mga device.

14 found these disturbing entries in Xorg.0.log

(--) MGA(0): BIOS at 0xF7000000
Requesting insufficient memory window!: start: 0xf6800000 end: 0xf77fffff 
size 0x2000000
(EE) Cannot find empty range to map base to
(WW) MGA(0): Video BIOS info block not detected!


My first question is why weren't the input-keyboard and input-mouse 
devices loaded in the default install?

Just how badly broken has the video-mga device gotten in FreeBSD.

I have heard from a 6.3 user who cannot change resolutions from the 
keyboard and he is using an ati device.

drm0: <ATI Radeon RV280 9250> port 0xa000-0xa0ff mem
0xe0000000-0xe7ffffff,0xfd800000-0xfd80ffff irq 16 at device 0.0 on
pci1 info: [drm] AGP at 0xf0000000 128MB info: [drm] Initialized radeon
1.25.0 20060524

So what is going on with xorg in FreeBSD 6.3? Is there anything I can do
to fix the problems.

Thanks,

peter