Fedora 8 / Xorg 7.3 - VT switch yields all-white screen on ATI Mobility 7500

[Alex Deucher]

On Dec 7, 2007 8:47 AM, Erez Hadad <erez.hadad at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I have a laptop (Compaq Evo N1000v) with a graphics card of ATI Technologies
> Inc Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500] with 32MB memory. I'm
> running Fedora 8, and the auto-installed X driver is "radeon".
>
> My problem is that whenever I switch from the default graphics mode
> (1400x1050 at 60Hz) to any other mode, and specifically to text mode, the LCD
> screen displays a white stain that expands and engulfs the entire screen,
> making it completely white (kind of a fade-to-white effect). However, when I
> switch back to graphics mode, the display is resumed perfectly with the
> graphic desktop environment. The machine does not freeze or crash.
>
> To make sure this is not a hardware problem, I ran X with the "vesa" driver,
> and it worked smoothly for all mode switch operations, although this driver
> yields (not surprisingly) lower performance in 3D, as I measured with the
> glxgears app.
>
> I attached the configuration and the log files of both vesa and radeon. One
> thing I noted is that the radeon driver operates on all 3 outputs of the
> card: the LVDS (which I believe is the LCD screen), the CRT (the external
> VGA connector) and the TV (which is the external S-Video connector). I also
> inserted "@@@@@" strings in the logs at the places where the mode-switch
> took place. It seems that the "radeon" driver performs "RESTORE" operations
> on all the outputs when it comes back to graphics mode. However, when it
> switches to text mode, it does not "RESTORE" the LVDS, just the TV and CRT
> outputs (I think). Can this be somehow attributed to the fade-to-white
> problem I mentioned above? Alternatively, can anyone suggest a way to make
> the "radeon" driver work properly?


Can you try again with the latest code in ati git master?

>
> Note that the "vesa" driver does not log any meaningful operation on the
> graphics card at all during mode switch - just switch the Synaptics touchpad
> on and off.
>
> I have also tried various combinations (from man-pages and web sites) of
> both radeon-specific and generic options in the xorg.conf. None of these
> combinations solved my problem. Last but not least: the "ati" driver has the
> same problem as the "radeon" driver.

ati and radeon are the same driver.  ati is just a wrapper that loads
the appropriate driver, radeon in this case.

Alex