Ati Driver Freezes X on start

[bridgman]

Angus, I don't have an immediate answer for using fglrx but now at least I know what question to ask. Our dev team (Matthew actually) is aware of the BIOS problems and they were the ones who suggested testing with <4GB to confirm the problem, but in general they have seen the problem go away once the mobo vendor provides an upgrade that properly handles 4GB support.

That said, if the VESA driver works then it's possible that the problem is only related to (say) acceleration, in which case (a) disabling DRI on fglrx might help and (b) there's a good chance that one of the open drivers might work, and they would definitely give you reliable 1680x1050 operation.

So:

1. Try disabling DRI on fglrx - I don't have the option in front of me, hopefully someone can jump in.

2. Give radeonhd a try - I think you should be able to download a package for release 1.1 if you don't feel like downloading from git and building from source.

You should definitely be able to add 1GB back in (total 3GB) and the suggestion above about setting RAM to 4095K would also be worth tryng. Obviously continuing to look for mobo BIOS upgrades would be good too.

I don't think we have a good driver workaround for this particular BIOS issue but will check to see if anything new has turned up.

[Angus]

Angus, I don't have an immediate answer for using fglrx but now at least I know what question to ask. Our dev team (Matthew actually) is aware of the BIOS problems and they were the ones who suggested testing with <4GB to confirm the problem, but in general they have seen the problem go away once the mobo vendor provides an upgrade that properly handles 4GB support.

Oh. I'll go bug Acer then.

That said, if the VESA driver works then it's possible that the problem is only related to (say) acceleration, in which case (a) disabling DRI on fglrx might help and (b) there's a good chance that one of the open drivers might work, and they would definitely give you reliable 1680x1050 operation.

So:

1. Try disabling DRI on fglrx - I don't have the option in front of me, hopefully someone can jump in.

That seemed to work! By putting Option "NoDRI" in Section "Device" in xorg.conf, X did indeed start, and with 1680x1050 resolution. Thanks!

You should definitely be able to add 1GB back in (total 3GB) and the suggestion above about setting RAM to 4095K would also be worth tryng. Obviously continuing to look for mobo BIOS upgrades would be good too.

mem=4095M didn't work. Neither did mem=3583M.

So what am I losing by not having DRI? I've noticed that certain screen updates are as slow as a sleeping snail. For instance, if I grab the vertical scroll bar on this very page, and drag it, the updates are painfully slow. I would say this is barely preferable to having a bad aspect ratio.

[bridgman]

So what am I losing by not having DRI? I've noticed that certain screen updates are as slow as a sleeping snail. For instance, if I grab the vertical scroll bar on this very page, and drag it, the updates are painfully slow. I would say this is barely preferable to having a bad aspect ratio.

You are pretty much losing all acceleration. Might be worth trying one of the open drivers. The radeonhd driver, for example, has "shadow framebuffer" code paths which maintain a copy of the framebuffer in system memory and blit the changed bits up to your graphics card when necessary. It sounds crude but delivers pretty decent performance without acceleration.

I would give radeonhd a try as your next step. It will definitely deliver better unaccelerated performance than fglrx. For video playback you'll want to pick the "X11" option wherever possible.

[Angus]

I tried contacting Acer tech support asking about a BIOS upgrade, and they gave me a lot of double-talk about not supporting Linux software, drivers not being under warranty, and so on. I.e., "we're a bunch of jackasses so we're going to point the finger in all other directions".
I also gave RadeonHD a try. Their documentation didn't inspire a lot of confidence, but after trying the mailing list, pretty soon I was able to get it all running. Now I've got 1680x1050 with fast refreshing. Excellent! Thanks for all your help