Xorg, Radeon and KMS problems

Sun Jul 27 12:09:29 UTC 2014

On Sun, Jul 27, 2014 at 08:32:41PM +1000, Da Rock wrote:
>  God I have some weird shit going on atm...

You're between a rock and a hard place? ;-)

BTW, could you try to configure your e-mail program to use proper quote marks (“>”)?
It's kind of hard to find what you wrote without it.

>  Ok, haven't quite got it all in place yet - haven't had time to recompile
>  Xorg yet without hal.

Setting "AutoAddDevices" to "off" is probably sufficient. And you only
need to rebuild xorg-server AFAIK.

>  But I have done the preliminary xorg.conf and given
>  it a shot. It works... but I think I've made a discovery of weird
>  proportions. Being dual card I believe Xorg is writing to both cards to one
>  screen. It kinda makes sense with the issues I'm having; what twigged me is
>  this weird xsreensaver effect where there are 2 screensaver programs going
>  at once on the one screen - something that usually only happens if there
>  are 2 screens connected like an external monitor, except there's one
>  screensaver on each.

Ok. Weird. But that could also be a bug in xscreensaver.

Check if it is possible to disable one of the graphics chips in the BIOS.
That could be a last resort fix. AFAIK Xorg doen not have proper support for
using two graphics cards or switching beteen them.

>  What I reckon I need to do is to be able to take control of this process
>  and say I want the 4200 going to the built in, and the HD to the external
>  HDMI/VGA. Tried playing with that on 9.x but I've never been that good with
>  Xorg and all its magic blackboxness :D

In the device section for the chips, you can specify it which monitor section
to use. See xorg.conf(5) excerpt below. N.B: the output for the built in panel
is probably called “LVDS”.

    MONITOR SECTION

       The  config file may have multiple Monitor sections.  There should nor-
       mally be at least one, for the monitor being used, but a  default  con-
       figuration will be created when one isn't specified.

       Monitor sections have the following format:

           Section "Monitor"
               Identifier "name"
               entries
               ...
           EndSection

       The  only mandatory entry in a Monitor section is the Identifier entry.

       The Identifier entry specifies the unique name for this  monitor.   The
       Monitor section may be used to provide information about the specifica-
       tions of the monitor, monitor-specific Options, and  information  about
       the video modes to use with the monitor.

       With  RandR  1.2-enabled  drivers, monitor sections may be tied to spe-
       cific outputs of the video card.  Using the name of the output  defined
       by the video driver plus the identifier of a monitor section, one asso-
       ciates a monitor section with an output by  adding  an  option  to  the
       Device section in the following format:

       Option "Monitor-outputname" "monitorsection"

       (for example, Option "Monitor-VGA" "VGA monitor" for a VGA output)

       In  the absence of specific association of monitor sections to outputs,
       if a monitor section is present the server will associate  it  with  an
       output  to  preserve  compatibility for previous single-head configura-
       tions.

But I guess you'll have to remove one of the cards from your xorg.conf.
to force Xorg to use the other one.

>  Also, how does no hal work? What does that effect with regards other apps?

No HAL means you have to tell Xorg more about the hardware. But otherwise it
works fine. I'm not sure what other stuff uses hal. I have never used it nor missed it.

But I'm using only a light-weight tiling window manager instead of a full fledged
desktop environment.

>  Are you speaking of using the devd option in make config too?

Nope. That's just for input devices. I'm not using that either.

>>  You cannot use the new vt(4) driver on 10.0-RELEASE. It is only available
>>  on 10-STABLE. This means that you cannot switch from X back to the sc
>>  console.  That is not supported with kernel modesetting. You will either
>>  have to do without or upgrade to 10-STABLE. I'm on r269090 using a Radeon X
>> 1650 Pro and it works fine.
>
>  Good to know. Was wondering how that all fit... is vt tied with the
>  graphical boot or separate altogether?

You need vt(4) to do a graphical boot, and to get an utf-8 capable console.

>  For reference my kldstat looks like this atm:
>  Id Refs Address  Size     Name
>  1    45 0xffffffff80200000 15f0310  kernel
>  2    1  0xffffffff81a12000 432d4    linux.ko
>  3    1 0xffffffff81a56000 116c16    radeonkms.ko
>  4    1 0xffffffff81b6d000 47147     drm2.ko
>  5    4 0xffffffff81bb5000 1ccf      iicbus.ko
>  6    1 0xffffffff81bb7000 1a2a      iic.ko
>  7    1 0xffffffff81bb9000 1ad8      iicbb.ko
>  8    1 0xffffffff81bbb000 1028     radeonkmsfw_RS780_pfp.ko
>  9    1 0xffffffff81bbd000 5b1f     radeonkmsfw_RS780_me.ko
> 10    1 0xffffffff81bc3000 131b     radeonkmsfw_R600_rlc.ko
> 11    1 0xffffffff81bc5000 18a6     radeonkmsfw_CEDAR_pfp.ko
> 12    1 0xffffffff81bc7000 1ca1     radeonkmsfw_CEDAR_me.ko
> 13    1 0xffffffff81bc9000 1329     radeonkmsfw_CEDAR_rlc.ko

You might want to try and disable the HD6300 and then run kldstat again, to
see which radeon* modules are specific to the HD4200. Because those are the
ones you need to load /boot/loader.conf to get vt(4) working on 10-STABLE.

>  Hope that helps clear the picture so that you can give more focused help,
>  but I will get back probably tomorrow once Xorg is rebuilt with the results
>  of that step.

Hope this helps.

Roland
--
R.F.Smith                                   http://rsmith.home.xs4all.nl/
[plain text _non-HTML_ PGP/GnuPG encrypted/signed email much appreciated]
pgp: 5753 3324 1661 B0FE 8D93  FCED 40F6 D5DC A38A 33E0 (keyID: A38A33E0)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-x11/attachments/20140727/c1f5d2f9/attachment.sig>