[opensuse] ATI fglrx driver problems
I have been working on trying to get a new system up an running for a media center and guess you might say I have gotten a bit frustrated with it. I am running SuSE 10.3 on a dual core Athelon x64 system with the ATI Radeon x1900 card. I need to run this as a dual head system, one head controlling a large LCD display over DVI and the other head controlling a small LCD display over VESA. I need to have this working in a clone mode as the small display is used for controlling the system from another room.... During the course of my investigations I have discovered that neither Sax2 nor Aticonfig can be relied on to set up xorg.conf correctly. Using either of these tools will break my system and cause subsequent boots to bring up a useless display on the large LCD monitor. (I am running it at 1920 x 1080 interlaced with a refresh rate of 30hz which is the ONLY mode I have been able to get this to display properly) I have discovered that both Sax2 and Aticonfig will trash xorg.conf and make changes to it that are flat wrong (such as truncating decimal places in modelines or even removing modelines and other settings entirely, not to mention that the xorg.conf gets reorganized differently and thus causes the other tool be become confused sometimes and then crash!) I strongly suspect that both of these tools have expectations on how the xorg.conf file should be laid out and organized and if the file deviates much (even though the file is technically formatted correctly according to Xorg's rules) then these tools are not robust enough to handle the variation. Both tools could have used a lot better testing IMHO! I have simplified my xorg.conf to the point of having only one modeline for my monitor and then tried to use aticonfig to build a dual head version from there. But even after hand correcting the decimal truncation error that aticonfig will do to it, I still have not had any success getting a dual head configuration to work. So given that these tools are next to useless for me I decided the best course was to try an hand modify/setup xorg.conf. After many many hours of research I finally discovered that one can have the X server itself generate an xorg.conf.new template file with all the possible settings that the fglrx driver knows about. THERE ARE A LOT!!! And also, somewhat amazingly, there is considerable differences elsewhere between what this file suggests should be used and what Sax2 or Aticonfig generate! Next I tried to track down documentation on what all these settings are and discovered that ATI has done an incredibly poor job of documenting their fglrx driver. Other distributions do have man pages which I found on the internet that cover some of these but not all, and SuSE supplies a bit of html documentation, again not thorough. Most of this is way above my head anywise as I am NOT a video driver expert by any means, so understanding it is extremely difficult if not impossible! I have not had any luck getting this dual head configuration to work once SuSE has booted up and the X windows system (under KDE) takes over. I have had some luck getting it to work in single head mode with the main large LCD monitor, but to make matters worse my problem is compounded by the fact that even when I do get it to boot up, the system will only remain up for about 5 to 10 minutes before it freezes. Then the only recourse is to reboot it. The X server will not respond to any keyboard or mouse input at that point, not even a CTRL ALT Backspace to restart it. This freeze happens regardless of whether I am trying to configure the system as a dual head or as a single head system. It is particularly sensitive to things like trying to run an openGL application (such as a screen saver) which I have turned off, and I have also turned off all power saving modes to eliminate those as possible causes. It STILL freezes up in a short amount of time. I dunno if I can figure out how to get the xorg.conf file configured right to support a dual head system and I dunno if my current configuration is perhaps not quite right but at least for 10 or so minutes it will give me a good display image so I must be close to having the primary head configured right. I have been trying to track down this instability and after many reboots and poking around one type of warning message is often coming up in the WARN file under /var/logs which I see a lot (but not always) as the last thing that happened before I had to reboot from a freeze - Feb 10 17:42:31 nova kernel: [fglrx:firegl_free_mutex] *ERROR* mutex id 0x00000004 not found in mutex list Feb 10 17:42:40 nova kernel: [fglrx:firegl_free_mutex] *ERROR* mutex id 0x00000005 not found in mutex list If I had to guess this does seem rather serious as I would speculate that this is a mutual exclusion semaphore that got lost somehow? (I am an experienced programmer, though NOT a Linux wonk, and I do know that if so, that could lead to deadlocks and all kinds of serious chaos such as what I am experiencing with the whole system locking up on me. I have tried to contact the ATI/AMD Linux Crew for the fglrx driver on this but so far that has been like trying to talk to a black hole... No response whatsoever.... (Have also complained about the serious lack of documentation and that too has gotten no response..) I can post my xorg.conf, warn, message and Xorg.0.log files if some kind ATI fglrx driver guru wants to help me out of this quagmire and would like to see them. I am pretty close to giving up on ATI and go and plunk down a few hundred sheckles on an nVidia card and try out their world instead. As I said, trying to get this ATI card up and running has turned into a real frustrating experience, just getting my large LCD monitor up an running was a nightmare I don't ever want to go through again, and now this! So bottom line, I have two serious issues to solve, how to configure my system to use both monitors in a cloned dual head fashion, and how to overcome these freezes that lock it up. Marc... who is beginning to regret ever having bought an ATI video card... -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
Marc Chamberlin wrote:
I have been working on trying to get a new system up an running for a media center and guess you might say I have gotten a bit frustrated with it. I am running SuSE 10.3 on a dual core Athelon x64 system with the ATI Radeon x1900 card. I need to run this as a dual head system, [big snip]
Marc... who is beginning to regret ever having bought an ATI video card...
Marc, I've using the very same driver for my Radeon X1650 card - no probs whatsoever. I think you ought to fold the [big snip] above into a bug report to Novell: http://bugzilla.novell.com/ /Per Jessen, Zürich -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
participants (2)
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Marc Chamberlin
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Per Jessen