Freezing with ATI Radeon 9800 (NetBSD/amd64 4.0)

[Alex Hanson <alex%alexhanson.org@localhost>]

I'm not sure if this is platform-specific, so I posted it here.

I am running NetBSD/amd64 4.0 (the stable release version). I use 
modular Xorg as installed via pkgsrc following the instructions on the 
NetBSD wiki. My Xorg configuration can be found here:

http://alexhanson.org/conf/xorg.conf

This configuration worked fine for a while, but I went a few weeks 
without using NetBSD and then found that it would no longer work. The 
system would freeze and the screen went black. The monitor was still 
turned on, however, and never went into standby.

I thought that somewhere along the line, some file may have be come 
corrupted, so I decided to install NetBSD again from scratch. (I used 
the same CD for installation -- I never did a checksum.) This time, Xorg 
worked once, then stopped working after I rebooted.

Using SSH, I was able to see the messages X printed out before freezing:

http://alexhanson.org/conf/log.txt

I don't know if the problem is hardware or software. Windows seems to 
work fine with the card, although it too has malfunctioned a couple 
times where the screen would turn black when it tried to switch from 
BIOS-enabled VGA to my actual driver.