older ATI mobility chipset support

[Tijl Coosemans]

On Tue, 10 Nov 2020 16:34:32 +0100 Gerrit Kuehn
<gerrit.kuehn at aei.mpg.de> wrote:
> I have an old notebook I didn't use for some time (I think it used
> to work fine under 11.1 in 2018, now I'm trying to run 11.4 after some
> upgrading). When trying to "startx" after booting or trying to load
> "radeonkms", the machine crashes with something weird happening on the
> screen (it really slowly goes white with clouds, looks quite
> phychodelic ;-).
> 
> The graphics identifies as "RV250/M9 GL [Mobility FireGL 9000/Radeon
> 9000]". I'm not sure if this is supposed to work with anything (but it
> did in 2018).
> https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/AMD-GPU-Matrix lists "Radeon 9000" and
> "RV250" as supported, but I'm unsure if this is meant to include the
> Mobility variant above. If not, are there any other options? As
> mentioned, just starting X (without trying to load radeonkms in
> advance) crashed quite the same way...

Do you have graphics/drm-fbsd11.2-kmod installed, because that probably
doesn't work for such an old card.  The old radeonkms and drm2 modules
included with FreeBSD (/boot/kernel/radeonkms.ko) should work though.  I
believe graphics/drm-fbsd12.0-kmod and later also work but then you have
to upgrade to FreeBSD 12.  I use graphics/drm-current-kmod on FreeBSD 13
with an RV350.