[arch-general] Last Updates w/kernel 2.6.33.4-1 -> 2.6.34-2 broke radeon driver for RS690M cards

[C Anthony Risinger]

On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 1:19 PM, David C. Rankin
<drankinatty at suddenlinkmail.com> wrote:
> Guys,
>
>        Just updated my laptop's spare drive and something in the last set up
> updates, which included the kernel, really affected the radeon driver badly.
> It's almost like I am back running in framebuffer mode. I'm not quite sure
> where to start troubleshooting as I am not familiar at all with the changes
> kms introduced into the radeon driver soup, but I suspect that may be where
> the problem lies. I have no xorg.conf, so if there are config issues, it's
> with the default config.
>
>        When I updated to the 2.6.33 kernel (2.6.33.4-1), I was ecstatic. The
> radeon driver was working the best I had ever seen it. Heat control was much
> better and frame rate had almost quadrupedaled and compiz worked great.
>  IIRC, I even posted here giving kudos to the devs on how good it was
> working. With the update to 2.6.34-2, it is worse than ever before.
> Specifically, compiz will no longer run -- it just whitescreens. (usually a
> problem with the driver NOT being loaded). However, in this casee, all of
> the radeon modules are loaded:
>
> [01:10 alchemy:/home/david] # lsmod | grep rad
> radeon                790145  2
> ttm                    45713  1 radeon
> drm_kms_helper         23740  1 radeon
> drm                   162265  4 radeon,ttm,drm_kms_helper
> i2c_algo_bit            5071  1 radeon
> i2c_core               18364  5
> radeon,i2c_piix4,drm_kms_helper,drm,i2c_algo_bit
>
>        The biggest problem with the new packages is HEAT. We are now back to
> the point where the heat generated by the gpu and driver makes it
> uncomfortable to rest your palms on the palm-rest to type.
>
>        I don't know where to start looking. The Xorg.0.log isn't that
> remarkable at all. The only things that stand out are:
>
> [    36.790] (II) UnloadModule: "fbdev"
> [    36.790] (EE) Failed to load module "fbdev" (module does not exist, 0)
>
>        ** from earlier discussions, this is no big deal IIRC
>
> [    37.526] is imortant (WW) RADEON(0): Direct rendering disabled
> [    37.526] (II) RADEON(0): Acceleration disabled
>
>        ** this doesn't look good. I guess it means no DRI -- why is the
> question?  I know DRI is important to compiz and I'm fairly sure dri was
> working with the last kernel/radeon driver combination. The difference
> between the setup with 2.6.33 and 2.6.34 is day and night.
>
>        Also, the color in thunderbird has gone green -- literally. My normal
> dark gray message background is now green. I guess this is somehow related
> to the driver issue. The full Xorg.0.log and a screenshot of green tbird are
> here:
>
> http://www.3111skyline.com/dl/bugs/Archlinux/Xorg.0.log
>
> http://www.3111skyline.com/dl/bugs/Archlinux/green-tbird.jpg
>
>        I'm not sure where to start with this problem, with the
> xf86-video-ati package or with the kernel? What say the gurus?

while im not sure the exact problem (i have a radeon system too,
haven't updated yet...) you could try passing some flags to compiz to
get it up.  i had to use --indirect-rendering to prevent some serious
screen redraw issues on my fiancé's new EEE S101 (intel graphics).

any messages from the radeon driver should be in dmesg.

C Anthony