X locks system console

[Woland]

This is no longer a problem on 8.2-RELEASE

I have my workstation booting to a system console, and I like to start X manually with the startx command. No problems.

The problems start when I try to switch to a virtual console after X is started. Screen goes blank (no input at all to monitor). I go through all the VC's (Alt+Function[1-8]) and the screen remains dark until I hit F9 and get back to X. If I log out of my X session, once again, screen goes blank.

I can ssh from my laptop, run 'startx' and up it goes again, but this is quite obviously a sub-optimum fix.

I've combed through my logs, can't find any problems at all. I've tried using KDE and Open Box, same problem. I've even tried using X as root, no dice.

Frankly, I don't even know where to start looking now.

 

[wblock@]

Please show your xorg.conf and /var/log/Xorg.0.log.

 

[Woland]

My xorg.conf:
http://pastebin.com/MmxXciLD

logfile:
http://pastebin.com/VUvwTRHL

 

[wblock@]

The 5750 is far newer than the radeon driver officially supports yet. That said, it sounds like it's almost there but it doesn't correctly reset to console text mode. The vesa driver should work, but is a terrible waste of that card. Beyond that, I don't know what to suggest.

 

[Woland]

So it probably is my card? I guess the thing to do would be to file a bug report, but I don't even know where.

 

[wblock@]

xf86-video-ati 6.13.2, the latest one in ports, does not specifically support anything higher than a Radeon 4800-series card. You can look at driver history here:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati/

Interestingly, the latest version on there mentions the 5750 and 5770 in its man page. I'm going to try it out on my 4650, will report back.

 

[wblock@]

Okay, good news: after some rebuilding of the archive, I got the master version of xf86-video-ati built and installed. It works at least as well as 6.13.2 on my 4650, and seems smoother, but that's possibly just Hawthorne effect. The man page shows support for these newer cards:

       CEDAR       Radeon HD 5450
       REDWOOD     Radeon HD 5550/5570/5670
       JUNIPER     Radeon HD 5750/5770
       CYPRESS     Radeon HD 5850/5870
       HEMLOCK     Radeon HD 5970
       PALM        Radeon HD 6310/6250

The bad news is that it hasn't been packaged for a release yet, and it was some ugly, crude work to get it complete. This could just be due to my understanding of cgit or git in general. I think that xorg has a release coming up, and if that's soon that will be the way to go.

 

[Woland]

Thanks! I tried building according to the instructions, but of course
./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/xorg

came to its first problem and quit:

configure.ac:36: error: xorg-macros version 1.8 or higher is required but 1.6.0 found

Ports still has 1.6.0, so I guess that this is one of a set of dependencies that I will have to hunt down for the driver to compile.

I imagine that issues like this is what you mean by "ugly, crude work" though I would be more than happy to attempt it. Would you be willing to share what you had to do to get it to compile, if it is not too much trouble?

Even with the crippled driver, I get a nice simulacrum of 2D acceleration, and a mostly quite smoothly working card. With an even slightly less crippled driver, I predict my workstation will reach new heights of awesomeness.

 

[wblock@]

I'll send you a pm so as not to encourage the general public to do something ill-advised.

 

[adamk]

One thing to point out is that the radeon driver will not support any acceleration on HD5xxx GPUs till kernel modesetting is ported to FreeBSD. The latest xf86-video-ati from git will get 2D modesetting going with the radeon driver, but that's about it.

Adam