Re: Radeon, Debian Xorg, & evdev

[Helge H. <hel...@ai...>]

Matt Keenan wrote:

> I have a set up with debian sarge box with Xorg, 1 radeon 7000 agp and 
> 2 radeon 7000 pci, and set up to use evdev. I can run Xinerama ok, but 
> trying to run three independant X's just hangs the machine hard (no 
> caps lock, no sysrq, no ping). I think I might have to resort to 
> debugging the radeon driver :( I havent compiled in faketty / hijacled 
> because I dont need consoles on the other screens. evdev works a 
> treat! Any suggestions?

Are all your radeons initialized by video bios?
If not, use the "initprimary" option for the xservers running
on the two noninitialized ones.  (Probably the pci ones, assuming your
pc boot using the AGP device.

Also, make sure you get the BusID and Isolatedevice stuff right
for all the xservers - otherwise, it will indeed hang.

Try bringing up xservers one at a time.  Get two simultaneous ones
running before you try for three.  And try all permutations of starting
order - xserver bugs (or design faults) means that the starting/stopping
order matter sometimes. 

Disable DRI/DRM (3D graphichs)  for all servers while
experimenting. Yes, it may work, but it may
hang the machine too.  Once you get your three 2D desktops going, try
enabling the 3D stuff again.  It may work fine, but it is best to keep
another source of trouble away while experimenting.

Finally, if you debug the radeon driver - great!  Look for mistakes
where the xserver use legacy vga io ports (should really never ever happen
in order to be multiseat-compatible) and also mistakes where the
xserver accesses the wrong card.  You have several of the same type,
the driver writer may not have anticipated the case where an xserver use
only the third card, for example.

Helge Hafting