Some time ago I've found that my favourite framebuffer logo (black background "Powered by Gentoo") doesn't look well on my new machine (Pegasos II PPC with Radeon 9200 and Radeon frambuffer driver). The problem is that there are some strange bright dots on the logo - as I can't really take snapshot of the boot screen I used a digital camera, and placed the picture (~75kB) here: http://www.esi.com.pl/files/logo.jpg I use the newest ppc-sources-dev and all other logos looks fine only this one is distorted. I checked the includes in kernel sources and there is notning wrong with them - they are exactly the same as on my other x86 machine where the logo looks right. I think the problem is somewhere in radeon framebuffer because on x86 where it looks good I used vesa framebuffer (with exactly the same Radeon I use now in PPC machine). M.
Could you try using the vesa framebuffer and see if the problem still exists? Also, which exact kernel is this on?
Well, I'd be more than happy to try the VESA if only you tell me how to do that on PPC ;) Or maybe there is something I don't know? And yes - the same (exactly) card put in x86 PC using VESA framebuffer works just fine - logo looks exactly as it's supposed to. And to the version of the kernel version it's 2.4.24-ppc-dev-r2, but I had this effect from the first time I've run Gentoo on this machine and then it was 2.4.22-ppc-dev. It is possible of course that it's something wrong with my hardware, but then I would like to see something that would make a proof especially that almost everything else works fine (to the extents of the hardware and firmware support).
You need to build vesafb into the kernel, instead of radeonfb. Then pass video=vesa,XXXXXX on your kernel line in lilo/grub.conf.
Haven't you seen the irony? ;) How am I supposed to compile in VESA framebuffer (which is x86 PC feature and uses VESA bios) into PPC kernel? VESA is strictly x86 and (I did checked the kernel configuration) it even doesn't appear on PPC.
Heh. Wow, I didn't know that. Perhaps this is better left to the ppc-kernel team. I'm an x86 kernel guy, and haven't really played with the PPCs. Sorry about that. The only thing I can think of is possibly filing a bug at http://bugme.osdl.org, or joining #gentoo-ppc on irc.freenode.net and asking there. Maybe an upgrade to a 2.6 kernel would help. I think your best bet would be 2.6.5-mm4 which contains the latest fb drivers.
Well - I do consider an upgrade to 2.6, but for a moment I don't have time for that. And additionally it's not that easy with Pegasos - as far as I know there is only one specific working version of 2.6 kernel with full Pegasos support. And finally - I've reported this error with the severity "minor" as It's just a bit annoying and nothing more - everything else seems to work fine. And as I don't really turn the machine off a lot it's not much of a problem.
I'm sorry I couldn't help you more. The only thing I can recommend is heading to http://bugme.osdl.org and posting there. I'd include a link back to this thread if you decide to start a thread on the kernel bug tracker.