HD5770 bringup

[Dave Witbrodt]

On 04/10/2010 06:22 PM, Mark Knecht wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 2:07 PM, Alex Deucher<alexdeucher at gmail.com>  wrote:
> <SNIP>
>> you need 2.6.34.
>
> Now at 2.6.34-rc3

Good.


> Some headway. The radeon driver as well as drm_kms_helper and a number
> of other things are loaded and associated with the radeon driver.
> However early in the boot process - I think when the modeset happens
> because my Intel i915 does this also - the screen goes black. On the
> Intel the screen shifts to a smaller font. Here I'm just seeing a
> blank screen so far. The monitor can't find the signal and then turns
> off.

When you boot, the BIOS is using an old VGA text mode.  The Linux 
kernel, at some point fairly early in the boot process, will now enable 
the new DRM framebuffer.  The screen should go black momentarily, but 
should come back quickly in a much higher resolution text mode as the 
kernel continues to boot.

Can you mention what sort of cable connects your video card to your 
monitor?  Is it VGA?  DVI?  HDMI?  DisplayPort?

I have had black screen issues with the VGA connector on my HD 5750. 
DVI works perfectly for me.  HDMI works almost perfectly, but with some 
sort of issue with timings so that I end up with a pink/purple vertical 
line on the left side of my monitor.


> Independent of actually getting graphics should we be able to switch
> fonts at this point?

Needless to say, it should have been working and you shouldn't have 
gotten the black screen.  No intervention on your part -- say, to change 
fonts or resolution -- should be required.


> I can't find a package called libdrm_radeon in portage. Is this
> possibly part of xorg-server-1.7? I do have libdrm and xf86-video-ati
> but neither show a kms flag. Again maybe that's on newer versions?

(I'm not a Gentoo user; take the following with a grain of salt.)

You need a libdrm built with radeon DRM support enabled.  Neither libdrm 
nor xf86-video-ati will have their package names modified to indicate 
KMS or Radeon support.

You should find out what documentation is installed on your system with 
those packages.  For example, if libdrm was built with radeon support, 
the docs packaged with libdrm will probably indicate that explicitly.

If you don't know where to find the package documentation on your 
system, is their a forum or mailing list for Gentoo that you know of 
where you could ask questions?  Especially with Gentoo, I'm sure you 
would get immediate responses letting you know how to get libdrm with 
radeon support enabled.

If the version number on xf86-video-ati is 6.12.191 or higher, it will 
have at least some Evergreen support.  Best would be version 6.13, though.


> I'm not against going to a testing xorg-server but a number of Gentoo
> people are having trouble so I wouldn't go there without a good
> reason. Keep in mind this is a brand new machine. I have nothing
> invested in terms of work on it so most anything is OK at this point
> if it's going to produce positive results. I'll investigate unmasking
> the newer stuff, but I don't see libdrm_radeon anywhere as of yet.

If the "testing" xorg-server is 1.7.5 or higher, you should try it -- 
especially if you really are in the experimental frame of mind that you 
claim to be!  The main differences between version 1.7 and later 
versions like 1.7.5 and 1.7.6 were bug fixes; my own experiences have 
been very positive with these latest versions.  (Obviously, there are 
plenty of folks out there who are having very real problems with the X 
server, though, so I'm certainly not guaranteeing that later versions 
will work as good for you as they have for me!)


Good luck,
Dave W.