Re: radeon questions

Don Wilburn <[email protected]> writes:

> Thanks for your replies.  Building the radeon driver into the kernel
> seems to work, but trying to make it a module does not (for me
> anyway).
> It makes me wonder if nouveau could work in a similar fashion.

Try and find out. :)

> My X crashes were hardware problems.  The early DEC Personal
> Workstation has a DMA problem with its 64-bit PCI slots.=20

Yes, the older ones have a problem where a bus-master DMA transfer
crosses a page boundary may get corrupted.  The more recent SRM versions
include a whitelist of known-good devices, and will refuse to boot if an
unknown card is found in an affected slot (though there is an override).
The slots behind the PCI-PCI bridge have DMA transactions split on page
boundaries anyway, so those are not affected.

> Some well-behaved cards work fine, apparently.  This Visiontek card
> doesn't make that list. This is the first time I've had objective
> proof.  Switching to a 32-bit PCI slot fixed my crashes.  Once I found
> out those 64-bit slots were ordinary PCI. there was no reason to put
> the vido card there anyway.  If they were PCI-X (not express), I could
> have gotten a 66MHz bus at least, but mine are fixed at 33.  Boo hoo.
>
> My PNY GeForce 5200 did not cause problems in the bad slot.  Maybe the
> nv driver is too timid to cause a similar problem.  Maybe the hardware
> is less troublesome.  The question is moot.
>
> I let X default to my 17" non-widescreen LCD monitor's 1280x1024 and
> 24-bit color.  My first successful start of glxgears yielded about
> 60fps.  I'm happy just to see those gears turn at all.

60fps could simply be the vertical refresh rate.

--=20
M=E5ns Rullg=E5rd
[email protected]