Bug 79996 – xorg-x11-6.8.0-r4 breaks Radeon Driver

• Status: RESOLVED FIXED
• Product: Gentoo Linux

[Description Martin Pohlack 2005-01-29 13:54:17 UTC]

The switch between xorg-x11-6.8.0-r3 and xorg-x11-6.8.0-r4 resulted in the following behaviour (with xorg-x11-6.8.0-r3 everything was fine).

I have a T40p IBM notebook with a radeon M250 Mobility

1. Externally attached LCD monitor (@ 1280x1024, via DVI cable) shows very unsharp image on the right side.  Example: Not antialiased Pixelfonts get smoothed if I move a window to the right side of screen, but are ok on the left sid.

2. The laptop-internal LCD is larger (1400x1050) and has the same behaviour from left to right (about 1280 pixel).  From this point on there is light vertical stripe accross the whole screen which results in a lighter image on this right stripe.   The image on the stripe looks like in a region of reduced color depth (gradients get very visible steps etc.)


Internal LCD (1400x1050):
0                  1280  1400
+--------------------+----+
|                    |    |
|                    |    |
|                    |    |
|                    |    |
|                    |    |
+--------------------+----+

^                   ^ ^---^
|                   |   |
|                   |   +- light stripe with reduced "pixel depth"
|                   +- Unsharp and blurry pixels
+--- Sharp and crisp pixels and fonts


External LCD (1280x1024):
0                  1280
+--------------------+
|                    |
|                    |
|                    |
|                    |
|                    |
+--------------------+

^                   ^
|                   |
|                   |
|                   +- Unsharp and blurry pixels
+--- Sharp and crisp pixels and fonts


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. emerge xorg-x11-6.8.0-r4
2. start X with radeon driver

Actual Results:  
I get an X session with a broken display as described in "Details"

Expected Results:  
I would like a crisp an stripe-free image like xorg-x11-6.8.0-r3 gave it to me.

I checked xorg-x11-6.8.1.902.ebuild but this resulted in:

1) The same situation on the external display
2) No picture at all on the internal display

Please note that I do never use both screens at once, as this does not work yet
with external DVI monitor and radeon driver.

Please also note that this is not a hardware bug (I switched docking station and
LCD monitor).  Also windows delivers a very crisp image on the notebook itself.

I assume that some new radeon driver patch in xorg-x11-6.8.0-r4 introduced a
screen-mode init. bug?

[Comment 1 Donnie Berkholz (RETIRED) 2005-02-05 00:48:56 UTC]

If you'd like to search around bugs.freedesktop.org for this, that would be welcome.

[Comment 2 Martin Pohlack 2005-02-11 02:34:11 UTC]

I found a way to not trigger this bug anymore:

before xorg-x11-6.8.0-r4 I had to force a certain monitor layout using 'Option "MonitorLayout" "LVDS, TMDS"' etc. because the autodetection did not do what I wanted.  With xorg-x11-6.8.0-r4 this is not necessary anymore, but actually leads to wrong results (the ones described above).  So the real problem were settings whose sematic changed.

Currently my driver sections look like this for

(i) only the internal display:

Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Ati Radeon Mobility 9000"
    Driver      "radeon"
    Screen      0
    BusID       "PCI:1:00:0"
    Option      "AGPMode"       "4"
    Option      "backingstore"  "true"
#    Option     "MonitorLayout" "LVDS, TMDS"
EndSection


and (ii) the internal display and an external TFT attached via DVI using mergedfb (please note that therefore my radeon driver is patched a little bit):


Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Ati Radeon Mobility 9000 Ext"
    Driver      "radeon"
    BusID       "PCI:1:00:0"
    Option      "AGPMode"       "4"
    Option      "backingstore"  "true"
    Option      "MonitorLayout" "TMDS, NONE"
EndSection

[Comment 3 Donnie Berkholz (RETIRED) 2005-05-25 04:10:48 UTC]

Seems like configuration issue then.