Zaphod mode and DRI

[Chewi]

Both drivers no longer keep my card's fan running full speed so I thought I might be able to finally move away from fglrx. I came crawling back though.

radeonhd doesn't support Zaphod mode at all. Is that likely to change?

I was pleased to see that radeon does support it but not with DRI. Is this a hard fix? I'm not complaining, I just want to have some idea of how much longer I'll be stuck with fglrx for. My second screen is a 32" TV on the other side of the room and simply having a "big desktop" doesn't work very well in that scenario.

[agd5f]

Both drivers no longer keep my card's fan running full speed so I thought I might be able to finally move away from fglrx. I came crawling back though.

radeonhd doesn't support Zaphod mode at all. Is that likely to change?

I doubt it.

I was pleased to see that radeon does support it but not with DRI. Is this a hard fix? I'm not complaining, I just want to have some idea of how much longer I'll be stuck with fglrx for. My second screen is a 32" TV on the other side of the room and simply having a "big desktop" doesn't work very well in that scenario.

It's a fairly complex fix. The problem is the current drm system only supports a single master, so you could probably get the dri working with one head. For zaphod with dri on all heads, you'll need the latest kms/mm drm and such. Fedora 11 has the necessary bits. In the meantime you could use something like xephyr to simulate zaphod over randr dualhead.

[bridgman]

When you say "not with DRI" do you mean "the drm can only talk to one X server at a time so the second X server can't use DRI" ?

If so, I think airlied mentioned that the latest drm actually did support multi-master, as long as you were also using kms and memory management. I wasn't able to find the post but I *think* that's what he said...

EDIT - never mind, agd5f beat me to it

[Chewi]

I'm on Gentoo so I'm fairly used to bleeding edge stuff. Are you saying that if I grab those components and remove the check from the driver, it might work now? I'd be willing to give it a try.

Otherwise, I think I'll stick with fglrx over the xephyr solution. radeon actually locks up the machine entirely when I switch VT or try to stop X, including when I reboot or shutdown, so if I'm going to switch, it really needs to be worth it. I'm not sure how common crashes like this are at the moment so I haven't filed a bug report yet. Let me know if you think I should file one but I'm not sure what information I can provide beyond the fact that I have a 4670 and that radeonhd doesn't have this problem.

[agd5f]

File a bug (https://bugs.freedesktop.org) and attach your xorg log and config. You might also try the latest release (6.12.2) or git master first to make sure the bug is not already fixed.