freebsd7, radeon, xorg-server -> deadlock or so

[Norbert Papke]

On February 9, 2010, Robert Noland wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-02-10 at 01:36 +0100, O. Hartmann wrote:
> > The situation is heavily unsatisfying, since one need an expensive
> > AMD/ATi Radeon card to gain non-3D poor functionality, where a cheaper
> > one should be do the same - but the cheaper ones don't work. Even if one
> > uses AMD64, the situattion is worse and I have no reason using
> > Linux-driver on a FreeBSD box. Hope the situation gets cleared in the
> > nearest future. It's a kind of deadlock. As I said, either spenig a lot
> > of money for a working RV770 based AMD graphics card with poor
> > functionality or nothing so far, since most smaller RV730 chips aren't
> > supported properly by the most recent drivers.
> 
> I'm only aware of one issue which leads to corruption.  I have patches
> that resolve that issue which are not yet committed.  If your are
> experiencing lockups with DRI disabled, then something very strange is
> going on and you will need to provide more details.  I don't remember
> exactly what drm code I have committed to 7 right now, but it should be
> fairly current as I don't think I have much in the way of outstanding
> MFCs.  The current drm and radeon drivers work on every card that I
> have, which in the r600 class are HD 3650,3850,4650.

I think the variable include more than just the model of graphics card.  I 
just replaced my motherboard, keeping all other components, disks, software 
and configuration.  With the old motherboard my HD 3650 was working great 
including 3D acceleration.  With the new board, X will hang/crash with DRI 
enabled.  Even with DRI disabled, I still experience problems with the screen 
not updating unless I wiggle the mouse.

The new mother board is an ASUS P5E3 Pro with an Intel X48 Northbridge.

The severity of the hang requires a hard reset (fortunately ZFS is 
resilient!).  No xorg log file is generated/preserved, nor is it possible to 
break to the debugger.  I do not have a serial console.  This makes it 
difficult to debug.  What could I do to shed more light on this situation?

Cheers,

-- Norbert Papke.
   npapke at acm.org