Ati-Driver 8.6/8.7 freeze on 32/64 bit

[Dragonlord]

I tried now various combinations: Gentoo 64bit, Ubuntu 64bit, Ubuntu 32bit with drivers 8.6 and 8.7 . The result is always the same: the system freezes roughly 15 seconds into using a 3D application like glxgears or the UT2k4Demo ( that happens to be around on that disk ). It looks therefore like a permanent bug which happens across architectures and distributions.

Some ATI guy can take stand to this? Why are your drivers looking up permanently in the most vital things: 3D?

To the guys who did the benchmark ( where it obviously seems to run ), what main board are you using? How many RAM are you using? From what I gathered from the review you use a 32bit Ubuntu 8.04 . I used the exact same to be sure it is not an architecture or distribution problem.

EDIT: Are there certain BIOS options which are known to cause troubles? I've set mostly all to auto and optimal values. What else could I test to narrow down the problem?

Everything else works except the lookup. Chances are the drivers are not "safe" enough for certain situations but figuring this out would be helpful also to other people.

[bridgman]

Some ATI guy can take stand to this? Why are your drivers looking up permanently in the most vital things: 3D?

Quick answer is "they don't lock up on our test systems" ie we'll need to find out which of the differences between our systems and your system is causing the lockup to appear. It may be a bad card but let's look for other things first.

I'll take a quick skim through your other posts and see if you have all the system info there, but could I ask you also to post a bug on the bugzilla system (http://ati.cchtml.com) ?

EDIT - OK, found most of what I was looking for :

- Asus M3N-HT Deluxe ( nForce 780a SLI )
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ ( Windsor )
- 2x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR2-1066 CL5
- Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 ( 512MB )

Nothing jumps out at me in terms of potential problems; it seems like a pretty solid configuration although I don't know if we have any test coverage on that specific chipset.

[Dragonlord]

Unfortunately I've got no account there. Maybe this adds to it:

# uname -a
Linux dragonworld 2.6.25-gentoo-r7 #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Jul 23 23:06:30 CEST 2008 x86_64 AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6400+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux

media-libs/mesa-6.5.2-r1
x11-base/xorg-server-1.3.0.0-r6
x11-drivers/ati-drivers-8.501

That's the Gentoo build I tested. The Ubuntu build is the same as the editors here used.

EDIT:
There's something fishy in the logs but I don't know if this has anything to do with the problem.

First what looks good:

(II) Primary Device is: PCI 04:00:0
(II) ATI Proprietary Linux Driver Version Identifier:8.50.3
(II) ATI Proprietary Linux Driver Release Identifier: UNSUPPORTED-8.501
(II) ATI Proprietary Linux Driver Build Date: Jun 2 2008 22:47:36
(--) Chipset Supported AMD Graphics Processor (0x9440) found
(II) AMD Video driver is running on a device belonging to a group targeted for this release
(II) AMD Video driver is signed

Suggests this should all work ( hey, we are supported... well... really? )

But what is not correct:

(--) fglrx(0): VideoRAM: 262144 kByte, Type: GDDR5

O'rly? Nope guys, it's 512 not 256MB GPU RAM!

Maybe the entire beast contains more fishy things I don't spot right now.

[smlbstcbr]

Unfortunately I've got no account there. Maybe this adds to it:



That's the Gentoo build I tested. The Ubuntu build is the same as the editors here used.

EDIT:
There's something fishy in the logs but I don't know if this has anything to do with the problem.

First what looks good:

Suggests this should all work ( hey, we are supported... well... really? )

But what is not correct:

O'rly? Nope guys, it's 512 not 256MB GPU RAM!

Maybe the entire beast contains more fishy things I don't spot right now.

Are you sure you are not using shared memory, like in windows? What I mean, half the memory reported in Windows belongs to your system memory and the other half is your video card.

[Dragonlord]

Are you sure you are not using shared memory, like in windows? What I mean, half the memory reported in Windows belongs to your system memory and the other half is your video card.

The Radeon HD 4870 is a dedicated graphic card not an onboard graphic chip.

[smlbstcbr]

The Radeon HD 4870 is a dedicated graphic card not an onboard graphic chip.

Actually, it does happen as well with dedicated graphics board. I own an X300 graphics board and it has 128 MB of on board RAM but it borrows another 128 MB from my system. CCCLE shows the onboard memory (I suppose), but the X log shows the 256 (I suppose). A bit messy, but the drivers are very functional, at least with my Gentoo

[legume]

But what is not correct:

O'rly? Nope guys, it's 512 not 256MB

That's "normal" both my working 512 cards say 256 there - amdcccle reports the full 512.

[Dragonlord]

Well this card has for sure 512MB dedicated memory and it for sure is bugged in the 3D mode

[smlbstcbr]

Well this card has for sure 512MB dedicated memory and it for sure is bugged in the 3D mode

Bad luck, I suppose. Have you reported this issue to the ATI Linux through feedback?, hopefully they will resolve this issue, that is present in fglrx.

[bridgman]

The 512MB vs 256MB thing is almost definitely a red herring, I don't think that is related to your crashing.

Nothing jumps out at me from the log other than the VideoOverlay option being on (it should ounly be on for pre-R5xx parts). You want TexturedVideo on, not VideoOverlay, but that wouldn't cause a crash. There's an "aticonfig --initial" (or something like that) command that resets the amdpcsdb contents to default; did you run that after installation ?

Looking for some way to determine if this is a driver/system issue or a card / power supply / heat issue. The usual way is to run some games under Windows and see if it runs reliably there; is that an option ?