horrible regreession in latest ATI xorg drivers
Hi everybody,
I just set up the latest Debian Sid using KDE 4.3 and the latest Xorg drivers
for my ATI Expert cards:
Exact type is: ATI Expert 2000 Pro Ultra, 32 MB RAM.
The latest xorg drivers do not need an xorg.conf file any longer. The automatic
configuration performed by the DDC I do highly appreciate so far.
However there is one enormous disadvantage of that automatic configuration
concept:
Starting KDM using the above mentioned card you end up in a dark black screen,
being forced to reboot the box and thus repairing your ext3 filesystem.
The reason for that is that the automatic DDC configuration system cannot
handle automatically which specific card subdriver of the ATI group (r128,
Mach64 or other ones) the specific card needs. The card's firmware is neither
sensitive nor differenciated enough to handle the subdriver choice
automatically.
My proposal to resolve that issue would be to merge the three different ATI
xorg drivers into one unique one, thus reverting some changeset made in March
2008.
The intermediate compromise for now is to uninstall xserver-xorg-video-ati at
the console prompt, so that at the next boot the r128 subdriver automatically
knows that it's his turn now to drive the card.
It should be obvious with utmost high priority that the current concept cannot
stay in the state that it is in right now. So please fix that bug!
As the firmware won't change due to the age of those cards the only solution
that at least I do see is to remerge all three subdrivers into one.
Regards
Uwe
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