Re: amd64 radeondrmkms near-invisble text

[eric%cirr.com@localhost (Eric Schnoebelen)]

"John D. Baker" writes:
- When I next rebooted, I thought I'd forgotten to disable pcdisplay/vga0
- again as the screen looked black except for the bright white cursor.
- It was in the wrong place, though.  (The pcdisplay/vga0 hang puts the
- cursor at the top left, but this time it was at the bottom, and some
- ways away from the left edge.)
- 
- Looking closer, I could just BARELY see the text emitted by the various
- rc scripts.  For some reason, when radeondrmkms attaches on this machine,
- the framebuffer console white text is exceptionally dim--the green kernel
- messages are invisible.
- 
- After confirming that this machine could run the amd64 port, I switched
- it over to that (7.99.5), but the radeondrmkms dim-ness persists.  The
- cursor is bright white, however, as I would expect normal text to be.
- 
- VGA text mode/BIOS/etc. and operation prior to radeondrmkms attachment is
- normal.

[...]

- Has anyone else experienced anything like this?  I have only one other
- radeon-equipped amd64 machine I've tried with a drmkms-enabled kernel
- and it worked fine (although it refused to use resolutions above 1024x768
- in X, when it's perfectly capable of 2048x1536 in UMS mode).

I've seen this on a DELL 1950.

My solution was to add "userconf disable radeondrm" to
/boot.conf for persistence (after doing it manually the first
time to be able to see sysinst and anything else.

I'd not realized there was anything vaguely readable on the
screen.  To me, it just  looked like the cursor was in the lower
left quadrant, about half size (or less) and blinking..

--
Eric Schnoebelen		eric%cirr.com@localhost		http://www.cirr.com
	He has a train of thought.  You have a tricycle...