Howdy,

Bought an Alienware M17x with the above video card (Crossfire) and having a problem with X / KDE.

Specs:

Intel Core i7
8 Gig RAM
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4870 Crossfire 1Gb
2 x 500g SATA
Slackware 13.1 64bit updated with repository patches
Custom Kernel (AGP/DRM disabled)
Using ATI's Catalyst Driver 10.9 (for now)

Problem:

When restarting X / KDE the system hard locks. No mouse, keyboard or blinking cursor. The first time I fire up X, everything works good. Graphics are smooth, 3D is working, etc. I end the session, fire off startx and I get a hard lock. Have to hard power off the laptop.


What I've tried:

After leaving X / KDE I rmmod'd ATI's driver, modprobe'd it back in and tried to startx. Same thing - hard lock.

Use the previous version of ATI's driver. Same result - hard lock.

I also tried using the open source drivers. I think I configured them correctly, but I had the same issue. Hard locks when I restarted X.


I have attached the Xorg log and messages. I dev/null'd the files before restarting X to see if there is some clue but the machine locks up before anything gets written.

Any ideas, thoughts?

Attached Files

	Xorg.0.log.txt (29.6 KB, 0 views)
	messages.txt (1.7 KB, 0 views)

I've been here.

Some dweeb updated things and made use of some table that only pcie has, breaking all agp cards in the process. Have a look at these threads

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...aphics-829120/
http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25805 (page 2)

and the patch
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...st/003373.html

I have kernel 2.6.35.4 there now on slackware-13.1 and that patch and all seems reasonable.
Have you KMS enabled? Another gotcha is that the firmware supplied by slackware is incomplete, and you need the 2 files referenced. KMS is achieved by
a. adding 'radeon.modeset=1' as a boot parameter
b. adding 'options radeon modeset=1' to /etc/modprobe.d/radeon.conf
c. Running an agp enabled kernel.
d. adding the firmware (referenced in the proronix thread) to /lib/firmware/radeon/

I'm running on the OSS driver, but I'm not a gamer

Do you know if those kernel options are required for the proprietary driver?

I disabled DPMS in xorg.conf and the issue seems to have been resolved. I can restart X without the lock ups. Don't know what is going on with it, but this system sure doesn't appreciate it.

No, I don't.
I gave up on the proprietary driver after a session of kernel building in the early days of the laptop which included a series of reinstalls for the driver. One of these reinstalls hosed the system, and I was back top ground zero. The kernel stuff will apply if you are using the kernel module afaict.