I'm having a great deal of difficulty making the latest Catalyst/fglrx drivers usable on my Ubuntu Natty 11.4 dual-head workstation. I've tried it with the Ubuntu-packaged drivers, r8.840, and by following the directions to build fglrx from the latest drivers, r.8.850. In both cases I was able to get Xorg/KDE to run, using aticonfig and a little hand-tweaking as necessary. However, no matter what I did, my 2nd monitor would have terrible flickering, making it very difficult to use. With a single monitor in place, no issues. With the OSS radeon drivers, no problem. With the old nVidia 8400GS card that I used to use, no problem (just slow!) I just can't get the Catalyst drivers to drive two monitors in a stable, non-headache-inducing way.
This sounds a lot like similar issues that Windows users have reported with Cypress cards and dual-head flickering. In their cases, the issue had to do with idle clock rates that were too low to handle two monitors without flicker. However, I can't find anything in the aticonfig settings to adjust idle clocks, only peak clocks.
lspci:
Note that I tried this with and without Xinerama, with and without XRandR 1.2 enabled, and with and without the --dtop line. No combination fixed the flicker. Here's a sample of my final attempt before giving up and going back to OSS Radeon drivers.
aticonfig commands, final attempt:
resulting xorg.conf:
This sounds a lot like similar issues that Windows users have reported with Cypress cards and dual-head flickering. In their cases, the issue had to do with idle clock rates that were too low to handle two monitors without flicker. However, I can't find anything in the aticonfig settings to adjust idle clocks, only peak clocks.
lspci:
Code:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Cypress [Radeon HD 5800 Series] (prog-if 00 [VGA controller]) Subsystem: Giga-byte Technology Device 21e4 Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR+ FastB2B- DisINTx+ Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx-
aticonfig commands, final attempt:
Code:
sudo aticonfig --initial=dual-head --screen-layout=right --xinerama=on sudo aticonfig --set-pcs-str="DDX,EnableRandR12,FALSE" sudo aticonfig --dtop=horizontal --overlay-on=1
Code:
Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "Layout0" Screen 0 "aticonfig-Screen[0]-0" 0 0 Screen "aticonfig-Screen[0]-1" RightOf "aticonfig-Screen[0]-0" EndSection Section "Module" EndSection Section "ServerFlags" Option "Xinerama" "on" EndSection Section "Monitor" Identifier "aticonfig-Monitor[0]-0" Option "VendorName" "ATI Proprietary Driver" Option "ModelName" "Generic Autodetecting Monitor" Option "DPMS" "true" EndSection Section "Monitor" Identifier "aticonfig-Monitor[0]-1" Option "VendorName" "ATI Proprietary Driver" Option "ModelName" "Generic Autodetecting Monitor" Option "DPMS" "true" EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "aticonfig-Device[0]-0" Driver "fglrx" Option "UseFastTLS" "0" Option "DesktopSetup" "horizontal" Option "OverlayOnCRTC2" "1" BusID "PCI:1:0:0" EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "aticonfig-Device[0]-1" Driver "fglrx" BusID "PCI:1:0:0" Screen 1 EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen0" Device "radeon0" Monitor "VGA1" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Viewport 0 0 Depth 24 Modes "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480" EndSubSection EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen1" Device "radeon0" Monitor "VGA0" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Viewport 0 0 Depth 24 Modes "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480" EndSubSection EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "aticonfig-Screen[0]-0" Device "aticonfig-Device[0]-0" Monitor "aticonfig-Monitor[0]-0" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Viewport 0 0 Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "aticonfig-Screen[0]-1" Device "aticonfig-Device[0]-1" Monitor "aticonfig-Monitor[0]-1" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Viewport 0 0 Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection Section "Extensions" Option "Composite" "Enable" EndSection
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