Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 109020
Graphics bug with ATI Radeon 7000 (PCI)
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:59:06 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Opera/7.21 (Windows NT 5.1; U) [en] Description of problem: To get RedHat Linux to run in graphical mode using an ATI Radeon 7000 (PCI), you must use the ForcePCIMode option. Some bug keeps the X Window System from recognizing/running in PCI mode on that card. Funny, though, that this never happened with RedHat 8... Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install RedHat 9 2. Boot it up (on a machine using the ATI Radeon 7000 PCI card) 3. Attempt to start the X Window System Actual Results: The screen went blank, and never came back on. Expected Results: Graphical loggin should have happened. Or in the case of attempting to start the X Window System after non-graphical loggin, the Gnome desktop should have loaded. Additional info:
This bug is misfiled against a nonexistant software component (X11R6-contrib), and would have never been seen had I not just found it accidentally while querying all bugs for "pci radeon". Please make sure to file bugs against the proper component to ensure the right people see the problem. Reassigning to XFree86 component.
Radeon PCI hardware is not officially supported by DRI, and may or may not work at all if DRI is enabled. Be sure to disable DRI completely, and to use option ForcePCIMode as indicated on the "radeon" manpage. AGP/PCI has never autodetected in the Radeon driver, however the mechanism to try to use it has changed over time. In the past, if agpgart didn't load, DRI just disabled, and PCI hardware would usually just work without 3D. In 4.3.0 however there is experimental DRI support for PCI Radeon, and it must be disabled explicitly if it doesn't work. Please try the options I mention above to see if it works for you. On a coincidental side note however, I am currently trying to make the driver properly autodetect PCI Radeon using proper methods now, and future updates should autodetect AGP cards and use AGP ability if agpgart is present or can be loaded, and fall back to PCIgart if not. For PCI cards, they should default to PCI mode in the future. For PCI Radeon users that have lockups with DRI, they'll need to disable the experimental DRI support, or debug the problem and try to find a solution, since the problems are different for every user and generally not reproduceable on random hardware. Also, in the future, AGP Radeon users having lockups should be able to try to use pcigart as an alternative, as it is getting better now. Can you attach your X server log file and config file also, and the output of the command: "lspci -vvvxxx" Please try my suggestions above, and update the bug report. Hopefully it can help to make the driver better in the future. TIA
I did figure out how to work around the problem, but since I never had the problem with RedHat 8 I figured it was a bug in RedHat 9. BTW: Sorry I posted this in the wrong place. I got a bit confused trying to find something about the X Window System. I'm still fairly new to Unix-based systems.
Since this bugzilla report was filed, there have been several major updates to the X Window System, which may resolve this issue. Users who have experienced this problem are encouraged to upgrade to the latest version of Fedora Core, which can be obtained from: http://fedora.redhat.com/download If this issue turns out to still be reproduceable in the latest version of Fedora Core, please file a bug report in the X.Org bugzilla located at http://bugs.freedesktop.org in the "xorg" component. Once you've filed your bug report to X.Org, if you paste the new bug URL here, Red Hat will continue to track the issue in the centralized X.Org bug tracker, and will review any bug fixes that become available for consideration in future updates.