Okay guys I spent 3 whole days working on this. What a waste of my life! If only I had at least a Radeon 7000... mine's working perfectly well... but no, I have a Rage LT Pro in my PowerBook G3 running Debian.

I started off by looking at dri.freedesktop.org's building page, and got libdrm. Eventually managed to build the drm modules by enabling agpgart (I disabled it because my Rage LT Pro was PCI and I didn't think I needed it). They loaded fine. Now for Mesa. I said to the latest git snapshot: make linux-dri-ppc. Then I copied things over to /usr/lib, and mach64_dri.so to /usr/lib/dri.

Each time I ran glxgears, the computer crashed. Xorg's log would say that direct rendering was enabled, but glxinfo said it wasn't. I messed around a bit more, restored the original Mesa modules, restored the original old libdrm, and it crashed all the same.

I don't know what I did this time. I recompiled it all (except for the drm modules) and installed a fresh copy of Mesa: it complained because drmcloseOnce was not defined: I found out that I needed that libdrm for that, so I installed it again.

Now, direct rendering is finally reported as working by glxinfo.But that's not the end of the story. glxgears hogs 100% CPU, and the gears never seem to move. And it seems from htop that most of these CPU cycles never go to glxgears anyway.... the bar is mostly red, which means that there's more CPU cycles being spent on system process than glxgears (which is supposed to take more CPU cycles than the system).

Checking dmesg, I find this horror:
I Googled desperately... this thing is really sucking away my life. I found a post on netbsd.se that came from 2003, and explained what was happening, but not how to fix it. Apparently very few people have had this problem.

Can anybody please explain to me how to fix this? I'm running Debian Etch on a Powerbook G3, Lombard, G3 333MHz, ATi Rage LT Pro (mach64 3D chip), 192MB SDRAM.