ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4870
 

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?

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.