Re: latest i386 radeondrmkms trials

["John D. Baker" <jdbaker%mylinuxisp.com@localhost>]

On Thu, 19 Feb 2015, Chavdar Ivanov wrote:

> I am probably repeating others, but if you add
> 
> Option "NoAccel" "True"
> 
> to your Device section in xorg.conf it might work. I am in a similar point
> under -current. With NoAccel set to True it works fine. Without it I can
> run Xorg, which gives me black screen with a functional mouse, a small
> white rectangle in the top left corner; I can kill Xorg from a different
> shell. If I run "startx" with only xterm and twm in .xinitrc, I get up to
> the pointer for the top-left corner of the xterm requested, then it panics.

Yes, this works.  With a minimal "xorg.conf":

Section	"Device"
	Option		"NoAccel"	"True"
	Identifier	"Card0"
	Driver		"radeon"
EndSection

Xorg works very well.  ISTR some suggestions about using

  Option 	"AccelMethod" 	"SNA"

although that might have been aimed at i915drmkms users.  I'll try it
on radeondrmkms for completeness.

Without the X option, "startx" gets as far as launching my window manager
(fvwm) although the root window stays black.  It switches from the
watch-face cursor glyph to the arrow and then the machine panics.  I'll
see about using a serial console to get more information.


I typically test these things with -current but I operate the machine as
a diskless client (netbsd-7 on local disk).  There is a very strange
behavior in that radeondrmkms will only work if "/dev/console" is on a
boot-time-populated tmpfs "/dev" and not on the NFS root filesystem.
If "/dev/console" exists on the NFS root, the kernel panics with:

  cnopen: no console device.

(I noted a similar behavior in:

  http://mail-index.netbsd.org/current-users/2015/02/23/msg026742.html

although radeondrmkmsfb is totally unusable in these cases.  In the
case of my i386 ThinkPad A31p, it's only NFS root that gives that
behavior--"/dev/console" on local ffs works fine.)

-- 
|/"\ John D. Baker, KN5UKS               NetBSD     Darwin/MacOS X
|\ / jdbaker[snail]mylinuxisp[flyspeck]com    OpenBSD            FreeBSD
| X  No HTML/proprietary data in email.   BSD just sits there and works!
|/ \ GPGkeyID:  D703 4A7E 479F 63F8 D3F4  BD99 9572 8F23 E4AD 1645