Bug#572405: crashes X when compiz is started
Package: xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
Version: 1.3.0-0+git6387ab4c-091112+vidabi7
Severity: normal
I am not a Debian Maintainer or a Debian Developer, but I _am_ a Debian
user who has been experimenting with 2D/3D acceleration and kernel mode
setting with Radeon HD 4850 since November.
Please be aware that radeonhd seems to be dead or dying, and many
distributions are proactively steering their users away from radeonhd.
The radeon driver (Debian package: xserver-xorg-radeon; upstream source:
xf86-video-radeon) is being developed at a very high rate, and it
supports mostly feature-complete 2D/3D acceleration on "r600" (Radeon HD
4XXX) hardware. Also, radeon supports kernel mode setting (KMS) where
radeonhd does not; all Linux distributions are rapidly moving toward
KMS, which is a Very Good Thing.
The graphics corruption you are describing on HD 4850 when using HD 4850
is known:
http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25309
The radeonhd lacked the hardware to test and troubleshoot, and lacked
the developer worker-hours even if they had the hardware, back when I
reported this bug.
The "unidentified card" log spam is harmless.
Neither radeon nor radeonhd currently can access more video RAM than is
mapped by the PCI bar. Support for "unmapped VRAM" is in the works, and
may appear in kernel 2.6.34; failing that, I expect it to arrive by
2.6.35... unless unforeseen problems delay it longer.
Compiz should work well on radeon. My advice is for you to get a kernel
with KMS support enabled, a new enough libdrm with support for radeon
DRM enabled, and mesa and radeon built against that new-enough
libdrm-dev package. These are all available in Debian experimental and
unstable thanks to recent efforts by the Debian X Strike Force,
especially Brice Goglin. You should be much happier with this
combination of packages than you are right now!
HTH,
Dave W.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (990, 'unstable'), (350, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.33-drt100223-383be5d.100225.desktop.kms (SMP w/4 CPU cores; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Versions of packages xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd depends on:
ii libc6 2.10.2-6 Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii libdrm2 2.4.18+dw2.6.32.9+drt-1 Userspace interface to kernel DRM
ii libpciaccess0 0.11.0-1 Generic PCI access library for X
ii xserver-xorg-cor 2:1.7.5-0upstream Xorg X server - core server
Reply to: