Gentoo on the 4780 - Page 2

I'm happy to say it's not SMP that did it -- My new kernel has SMP enabled, and hyperthreading's turned on. I've confirmed it's working by running top while compiling all the various GNOME parts, and right now it's showing 92% usage for CPU 1, and 86% usage for CPU 2.

Hyperthreading was enabled on the machine when I got it. Maybe other Sager models are different, but at least my 4780 seems to default to having it enabled.

The only other difference I noticed in BIOS settings after I reset to the defaults was that I had bumped the AGP Window from 64M to 128M (why? I don't know... it was there, so I messed with it). Whether that had anything to do with it, I can't say.

So far, the new kernel seems to see the sound card, USB, Firewire and IRDA ports with no tweaking needed at all. No modem yet, but I expected that, since it's a WinModem -- if I can actually get that working, I'll be pleasantly surprised. Other hardware in the "I don't know yet" category includes the 6-in-1 card reader and the TV tuner. I'll start playing with those once I get a GUI.

So far I've just done VESA myself... no luck with the Radeon console frame buffer yet, but I can't say I'm complaining about the VESA one. To be honest, though, all I did was pass "vga=791" to the kernel. I believe that's the code for 1024x768. I'm not seeing any signs of stretching, though, so I'm guessing it must be figuring out the horizontal size on its own (though secondary VTs, like when I press Alt-F2, etc., aren't quite as sharp as the first for some reason).

I'm afraid I can't help much with higher resolutions, since the 4780 only goes up to 1440x900.

Quick Update

Not much to report today, other than I can now confirm the card reader works fine so far, and I've pinned down the cause of the earlier freezes.

Interestingly, it *is* the AGP aperture setting in the BIOS. If I set it to 128, the kernel freezes at bootup. Anything else and the kernel comes up fine.

Still working on getting X and GNOME running. Everything is starting up just fine, and I can even log in using GDM. However, once I'm in, moving a window freezes the whole system up tight, to the point where I have to use the power button.

Still working on how to get around that one.

It's Alive!

Did someone say RTFM?

I printed off the instructions for the Radeon drivers from http://www.ati.com/drivers/linux/readme0370.txt and noticed I was going about configuring X all wrong. Once I ran fglrxconfig and restarted X, everything came up beautifully.

I had to manually add "1440x900" to the "Modes" lines of the XF86Config-4 file after fglrxconfig generated it, but that's all I had to do to get it working at native resolution.

So, finally, I'm posting this from Mozilla, and everything so far looks great.

Argh... Mikhail, when you reminded me to check if DRI was working, I found out it wasn't. I remembered I hadn't built the ati-modules package since my first kernel, and probably ought to do it again to make it match the current one.

Well, now I've broken something. The next time I loaded X, it froze the machine. I remember seeing some posts about DRI on ATI cards here somewhere... I think I'll go look for those to see what I may have missed.

That's what I'd gathered from cruising the forums here. Unfortunately, I'm still not there yet... As soon as X tries to load the (what's it called? fglrx? I'm away from the machine at the moment) module from the ati-drivers package, the whole thing locks up.

I also noticed the Radeon driver that comes with XFree86 doesn't do DRI, either (it spits out an error message that the card is too new and unsupported).

Without DRI enabled, though, everything's still working pretty well -- Getting around 400fps with glxgears, which sure beats what I got on my old box.

It's definitely the kernel module doing it. Loading it manually outside X does the same thing. I've also checked the X logs, and it's right at the part where it loads the module that things go haywire.

I was out this weekend and didn't get much of a chance to dig into it... hopefully in the next couple days I can figure out what's going on. The good news, though, is that everything except DRI is working great. The only parts not working yet (and I haven't worked on either one at this point) are the modem and the mini-cam.

Considering that, other than DRI, the only real "gotchas" have been not setting the AGP aperture to 128M, and disabling the modem in the BIOS to boot the LiveCD, the whole thing's gone relatively smoothly.

I'be been using the external one (the agpgart kernel module from 2.6.1, with the sis_agp module for the 4780's SiS chipset). I moved both modules out of the way, and reconfigured X to use internal agpgart. In the interest of keeping things clean, I also re-emerged the ati-drivers package (the stable one... does 2.3.8 sound right for a version number on that? I'm not somewhere I can check).

Interestingly, the machine now loads the fglrx module OK, and doesn't hang. It does, however, still lock up somewhere else in the X loading process. Back to the X logs...

I hate it when I enter a big ol' response and then close the browser without sending it...

Anyway, You're right about the version. I'm using 3.2.8 currently, though I did try 3.7.0 a time or two with the same results. I also have the /usr/src/linux link correct, after having it wrong the first time and ending up with a module that got installed in the wrong place.

Here's the graphics card's current "Device" section:

# === ATI device section ===

Section "Device"
Identifier "ATI Graphics Adapter"
Driver "fglrx"
# === disable PnP Monitor ===
#Option "NoDDC"
# === disable/enable XAA/DRI ===
Option "no_accel" "no"
Option "no_dri" "no"
# === FireGL DDX driver module specific settings ===
# === Screen Management ===
Option "DesktopSetup" "0x00000100"
Option "MonitorLayout" "AUTO, NONE"
Option "IgnoreEDID" "off"
Option "HSync2" "unspecified"
Option "VRefresh2" "unspecified"
Option "ScreenOverlap" "0"
# === TV-out Management ===
Option "NoTV" "yes"
Option "TVStandard" "NTSC-M"
Option "TVHSizeAdj" "0"
Option "TVVSizeAdj" "0"
Option "TVHPosAdj" "0"
Option "TVVPosAdj" "0"
Option "TVHStartAdj" "0"
Option "TVColorAdj" "0"
Option "GammaCorrectionI" "0x00000000"
Option "GammaCorrectionII" "0x00000000"
# === OpenGL specific profiles/settings ===
Option "Capabilities" "0x00000000"
# === Video Overlay for the Xv extension ===
Option "VideoOverlay" "on"
# === OpenGL Overlay ===
# Note: When OpenGL Overlay is enabled, Video Overlay
# will be disabled automatically
Option "OpenGLOverlay" "off"
# === Center Mode (Laptops only) ===
Option "CenterMode" "off"
# === Pseudo Color Visuals (8-bit visuals) ===
Option "PseudoColorVisuals" "off"
# === QBS Management ===
Option "Stereo" "off"
Option "StereoSyncEnable" "1"
# === FSAA Management ===
Option "FSAAScale" "1"
Option "FSAADisableGamma" "no"
Option "FSAACustomizeMSPos" "no"
Option "FSAAMSPosX0" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosY0" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosX1" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosY1" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosX2" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosY2" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosX3" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosY3" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosX4" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosY4" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosX5" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosY5" "0.000000"
# === Misc Options ===
Option "UseFastTLS" "0"
Option "BlockSignalsOnLock" "on"
Option "UseInternalAGPGART" "yes"
Option "ForceGenericCPU" "no"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0" # vendor=1002, device=4e50
Screen 0
EndSection