Re: obsd 3.3 & radeon 9000

[Matthieu Herrb <matthieu.herrb@wanadoo.fr>]

mangala wrote (in a message from Monday 8)
 > hi everyone,
 > 
 > i installed openbsd 3.3 on a dell inspiron 8200 with an ati radeon 9000 
 > graphic card. xfree 4.2.1 does not support this card as it's too new, so 
 > i tried patching which didn't help.
 > 
 > after that i decided to install xfree 4.3.0, so i downloaded the 
 > necessary source tarballs from http://www.xfree86.org/ and built and 
 > installed xfree. this seemed to work as i got x running in no time.
 > the only problem is, everytime i exit out of windowmaker and x shuts 
 > down, i can barely see anything anymore on the console. all other 
 > consoles have the same problem.
 > 
 > only after a reboot can i use the console normally, that is until i 
 > start up x again.
 > 
 > is there anyone who's come across this before?

Yes, this is a know problem with some XFree86 drivers. They are not
fully saving/restoring the  state of the graphics card across X
startup/exit. Unfortunatly, for some cards the fix is not easy. 

The problem is made a bit worse under Net/OpenBSD with wscons since
wscons does rely entierly on XFree86 to save/restore the text
mode. Linux users usually don't see that problem because the Linux
console driver has its own save/restore code. 

 > i assume waiting till november to install openbsd 3.4 (and with that 
 > xfree 4.3.0) would solve this problem quickly, but at the moment i'm 
 > interested in finding out what's causing this.
 > any ideas?

You'll probably still see the problem in OpenBSD 3.4, since the
XFree86 drivers that come with it are not diffenrent from the XFree86
4.3.0 drivers you got from XFree86.org.

Submit a bug report to http://bugs.xfree86.org, in order to prod the
radeon driver maintainer to fix the save/restore code.



					Matthieu