Radeon HD4870 & Catalyst 8.6 => system freeze

[Janusz11]

Hello all!

I have a serious problem here with my new ATi Radeon HD4870. When I install the new Catalyst 8.6 driver and run "aticonfig –initial" my computer freezes/locks up when I startx. The screen goes all black, sometimes even the lights of my keyboard go out and I have to push the reset button to fire up my box again. This is both under Arch Linux and Zenwalk.

I have noticed that the Phoronix article about the ATi Radeon HD4870 said that the card was working "out of the box" on Ubuntu with the Catalyst 8.6 driver. Therefore I'd like to know what you did to get the card working. Any changes to the xorg.conf? I can't try it out by myself because Ubuntu doesn't recognize my SATA HD.

[Kano]

Do you use Xserver 1.4 or 1.5? fglrx does only work with hardy as it uses 1.4.

[Janusz11]

Its xorg-server 1.4.0.90 (Zenwalk at least).

[Michael]

Its xorg-server 1.4.0.90 (Zenwalk at least).

That is a pre-release of X Server 1.5, which isn't quite yet supported by the fglrx driver.

[Janusz11]

Doh!

Thanks Michael. Do you have any information if the xserver will be supported soon then (read next driver release)?

[Chris Clearwater]

Janusz11, How much RAM do you have?

[Janusz11]

Chris, my system specs are as follows:

* MoBo: GA-EP45-DS4
* CPU: Intel Core2 Duo E8400
* RAM: Mushkin 4GB DDR2
* Graphics: PowerColor ATi HD4870
* HD: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB SATA II 300

[Kano]

Maybe remove 2 GB for testing.

[Chris Clearwater]

You most likely have MTRR problems. I have a P45 chipset and I experienced the same thing with 4GB+ of RAM. You can remove 1 stick of RAM to verify that this is the issue. It is the BIOS fault, not ATI. Read through this thread: http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10915 for information on manually setting up your /proc/mtrr (The BIOS reports false values).

[Janusz11]

Hey Chris, thanks alot! I didn't notice that thread, so sorry for opening up another one on this issue.

I'll give it a try tonight. Thanks again.

[Janusz11]

Kano, Chris, thanks to the two of you! Last night I took out one of my RAMs and after that xorg was indeed working with the ATi driver. So I tried your script Chris and it did the trick. Thanks again!

However, since I don't play games on Linux and Compiz effects are working just fine with the vesa driver I decided to stick with it for the time being.

Now I "only" have to figure out how to set my resolution at 1152x864 @ 100Hz. With my nVidia card this was just a simple matter of generating a modeline with gtf 1152x864 100 and editing the xorg.conf. But not so with the Radeon anymore (of course not! ...).

If you lads have any ideas, they are greatly appreciated.

[Chris Clearwater]

My card gets _really_ hot using the vesa driver. I think it uses a lot less power with fglrx, due to PowerPlay or something. So that might be a big factor to consider.

[Janusz11]

Yeah, that's true. The card get's pretty warm. But I thought PowerPlay (or whatever their new power saving technology iss called) doesn't work with their Linux driver yet?

Okay, will give the fglrx driver another try tonight...

[Chris Clearwater]

I don't know the reason, I just know that using the VESA driver, my heatsink gets really hot (I have an aftermarket, Accelero S1 Rev.2 on it) and with fglrx is stays only slightly warm. Also, this appears in my X.log.0:

(II) fglrx(0): Enable the clock gating!

[d2kx]

Its xorg-server 1.4.0.90 (Zenwalk at least).That is a pre-release of X Server 1.5, which isn't quite yet supported by the fglrx driver.

No. It is a pre-release of Xserver 1.4.1, which has been used by many distributions for several months.