DRI problems with ati/radeon on stable/7 r203425

[David Wolfskill]

I happened to notice something of which I hadn't been aware that might
be relevant to this set of problems.

First, I'm running r204909 as of this morning, though I first noticed
the effect (below) a few days ago -- I waited to post to confirm that it
wasn't merely an illusion.  :-}

On my laptop (which uses an "ATI Technologies Inc Radeon RV250 [Mobility
FireGL 9000] rev 1"), I have several things that I normally have running
(and one that pops up from time to time):

* I use piewm as a window manager.  (It's based on tvtwm, which is based
  on the Solbourne window manager, which was based on twm.)  [I used to
  use tvtwm on my Sun 3/60 some 17 years ago....]

* I run xbattbar to keep track of (reported) battery state.

* I run xautolock, configured to run xlock in "random" mode.

When I turn off DRI before starting Xorg (thus avoiding the lock-up),
things are pretty normal, though some of the screen savers make the CPU
work pretty hard (and some things are nearly impossible, but those
aren't really critical).

When I turn on DRI, and if the machine doesn't lock up, the screen
savers tend to be considerably snappier, but -- and this is the reason
I'm posting -- the xbattbar status line (a 3-pixel line running across
the top of the screen, in my case) often gets replaced by something else
(that's not determinate, as far as I can tell) when xlock kicks in.  The
xbattbar status line can be restored by switching to a vty, then back
to Xorg -- at least until xlock kicks in again.

I'm not claiming that there's a relationship (let alone a causal one),
but there does seem to be a remarkably consistent set of coincidences.

Peace,
david
-- 
David H. Wolfskill				david at catwhisker.org
Depriving a girl or boy of an opportunity for education is evil.

See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for my public key.
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