re: Problems with radeondrm

[matthew green <mrg%eterna.com.au@localhost>]

   I'm running NetBSD/i386 5.99.24 on an MSI board with an ATI Radeon
   2400 XT plugged in. To have 2d acceleration and XVideo, I load
   radeondrm.kmod at boottime. It usually works, but after restarting
   X sufficiently often, it suddenly stops; that is, either display
   is corrupted, or X does not find DRI support anymore. There are a

i see this on two of my systems.

one of the problems with restarting is that memory has become
fragmented and drm is not able to allocate what it wants, and
becomes disabled.

   few pecularities:
   
   >From dmesg (which is also attached):
   
   agp0 at pchb0: can't find internal VGA device config space
   ...
   ppb0: unsupported PCI Express version

this is ignoreable...

   ...
   vga1: WARNING: ignoring 64-bit BAR @ 0x10
   vga1: WARNING: ignoring 64-bit BAR @ 0x18
   
   and, after each restart of X:
   
   info: [drm] Setting GART location based on new memory map
   info: [drm] Loading RV610 Microcode
   info: [drm] Resetting GPU
   info: [drm] writeback test failed ffffffff deadbeef

i always get this writeback test fail as well.  i bet you do too,
it doesn't seem to be a problem... but i have not investigated
what it means.
   
   Usually, after a while I get a message that something failed; I
   think it has to do with the memory map, but unfortunately I can't
   reproduce it at the moment.

yup, the first problem is memory related.  there are more, but
as yet i don't know what is up.
   
   Trying to reproduce the problem, I tried to fill up RAM and make
   the system use swap. Indeed, radeondrm then got detached:
   
   radeondrm0: detached

yuck.  this seems unfortunate.

i don't use the drm modules, mine are built in.  i recommend
using them that way until someone looks at making the radeondrm
module less problematic.


i'm looking at this problem, but for me the simplest workaround
is to not restart X.  if i do, the good old 'huge dd block size'
trick works to force memory to become available most of the time,
but as i meantioned above, there is at least one other problem
that stops it working sometimes, but i do not yet have an idea
what is going on.

can i send you patches to test, ifwhen i have them?

thanks.


.mrg.