ports/156405: x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati driver: no hardware rendering

[Thomas Mueller]

>From my previous post and Niclas Zeising's response:

> > I had this type of problem with NetBSD 5.1_STABLE and 5.99.x even with native X that is part of the base system, as opposed to pkgsrc X.
> I can't comment on how NetBSD does things, since I haven't used it.

You aren't missing anything, judging from my experience.  FreeBSD is decidedly more advanced.

> > I could return to a text console in the dark and type "shutdown -r now" or even type the command to go back into X, successfully.
> In general, this can work.  It did last time I tested, but that was some
> time ago so things might have changed.

When I tried with new Xorg and KMS in 9-STABLE, my system froze immediately, not just the console.  I finally managed to downgrade to the old Xorg after considerable difficulty.

I'd like to try again on a new computer, with FreeBSD-current/HEAD (10.0 is in the not-so-distant future?).

With 3 TB hard drive and GPT, I have plenty of space and partitions to experiment, and probably less hazardous than the stablest versions of NetBSD.

> > With serial ports becoming obsolete, what can one use for or in place of a serial console?

> FireWire.  I haven't tested myself, but have a look at
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/developers-handbook/kerneldebug-dcons.html
> for instructions on how to use FireWire as a console.

This still leaves the question of how to set it up in terms of hardware.  I don't think there are any FireWire consoles.

Would I plug anything into the motherboard's FireWire port?  I just thought of FireWire-to-HDMI cable but haven't looked to see if these exist.

> > Would it work to have two xorg.conf files, one with Intel driver and the other with vesa?  Then could you go back to a working console when using the vesa driver?
> Once you've loaded the KMS awawre kernel module, there is no way to get
> the console back short of a reboot of the system.

But would starting X with vesa driver load the KMS awawre kernel module?

What about "xorg -configure" which I might want to do the first time?

> > I've wondered (call it X acrobatics) how to switch between root and nonroot, and between window managers, without going back to text console.
> You could try some sort of desktop manager, such as gdm or kdm.  I've
> not used them on FreeBSD, but on linux they make it possible to have
> several users logged into X at once, and switching window manager, and
> so on.  As for root, it is generally considered a bad idea to run X as
> root.  If it's just a root terminal you need, you can always open an
> xterm (or your favorite terminal emulator) and use su or sudo.
> Regards!
> --
> Niclas Zeising

On Linux (Slackware) I was only able to have one user at a time using xdm.

But I remember one menu item in KDE was konsole as root user (konsole is KDE's X terminal).

On NetBSD, xdm completely failed to run.

But I got some ideas from Gentoo Linux emailing list, haven't tried yet.


Tom