Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 176046
X on radeon 9250 crashes with kernel > 2.6.14-1.1756_FC5 (x86_64)
Last modified: 2015-01-04 17:23:47 EST
Description of problem: Starting X results in a black monitor and an otherwise unresponsive PC (keyboard dead, powerswitch only works if pressed > 4 seconds) Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): I've seen this with 2.6.14-1.1770_FC5 and 2.6.14-1.1771_FC5, 2.6.14-1.1756_FC5 works fine. This is an fully up2date rawhide system. How reproducible: Start X with an radeon 9250/9200pro on x86_64, dunno if this affects i386 too, I didn't try.
any chance you can hook up a serial console ? otherwise, the best hope we have of capturing any panic data from this is by hitting ctrl-alt-f1 as X is starting up, and hope that the screen resyncs back to the console before it blows up.
Hi' I've been quiet for a while because it took me some time to make the time to test some stuff. On the xorg mailing list some ati radeon patches have been floating around which fix a couple of radeon crashes. A fedora user has made an SRPM with these patches: http://www.erwinrol.com/downloads/software/xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.5.7-2.src.rpm Unfortunatly an rpm --rebuild for this driver doesnot work for me at all. This may be 64bit related, or just maybe my card. So I'm back to the latest Fedora driver. This still has the same issue with the latest rawhide kernel: kernel-2.6.14-1.1783_FC5.x86_64 I'll see if your switch to console trick works, or otherwise I'll try to borrow a laptop to use as serial console. What do I need todo to enable a serial console?
serial console is pretty easy to set up. (I really should document debugging tricks like this someplace). on the laptop, run minicom, and set the speed to 38400 (ctrl-A Z, P, G) on the box you're testing, add to the boot command line the options.. console=ttyS0,38400 console=tty0 and you should see the kernel messages appear in minicom.
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5104 looks like related. I see that on x86_64 too but comments in a quoted bug would suggest that this is not hardware, or even OS, dependent. A card I am using is Radeon 9500 but a reporter has Radeon 7000 VE QY. I have this problem from the time of a switch to "modular X"; does not matter which kernel. Turning off dri in X configuration file makes for a working, if slow, X server.
That bug is most likely not related at all, that is about an r300 card and I have an r200 card, also for me the bug only occurs with newer kernels.
turning off dri also makes no difference to 2D speed at all, so unless you're using some fancy 3D window manager, you should notice no difference in desktop performance.
> turning off dri also makes no difference to 2D speed at all ... Well, I tried ppracer and it was absolutely unusable. :-) There are other things you may want to try. Say, FlightGear.
I'm happy to report that this is fixed with kernel-2.6.15-1.1819_FC5.x86_64, closing.
I can turn on dri with xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.5.7.3-3 and it does not crash and it reports "(II) RADEON(0): Direct rendering enabled". I think that this is a question of a new driver and not of a particular kernel. This brings to light problems with GLX but this is another story.