Evergreen success story!

[Dave Witbrodt]

Thanks especially to David Airlie for his 'drm-radeon-testing' branch, 
and Alex Deucher for his introductory Evergreen support.

I tried a week ago, and when I got black screens I gave up too quickly 
and pulled the HD 5750, replacing it with my slightly older HD 4850. 
This time I also got a black screen, but (as before) Windows Vista works 
perfectly, so I know the hardware is not defective.

As it turns out, I use a KVM device that allows me to switch between 4 
machines using Dsub VGA connectors.  There are no VGA connectors on this 
HD 5750, so I was using a DVI-to-Dsub converter that came with the card 
so I could continue to switch between machines.  After logging in via 
SSH, and making sure I saved 'dmesg' and 'Xorg.0.log', I thought about 
that converter possibly messing up the situation.

I turned the monitor off, plugged in a DVI cable, and rebooted.  Voila! 
  Working KMS!  No acceleration, of course, but I'm just glad to see the 
ball toward open source Evergreen support starting to roll!  Switching 
between X and VT works fine, as well.  And (unlike last week) I am 
getting the proper 1920x1200 resolution for my monitor.

I have copies of 'dmesg' and 'Xorg.0.log' for both cases:  WITH and 
WITHOUT the converter.  The "radeon" driver seemed to be able to read 
the monitor info just fine even with the converter, but somehow DRM 
couldn't do the same -- the black screen occurs when the kernel switches 
from BIOS VGA to KMS radeondrmfb, and running X doesn't overcome the 
problem.  Is it too early with regard to Evergreen support to file a bug 
report?  I wouldn't even know what to file the bug against:  DRM in 
'drm-radeon-testing', I suppose.


Now, after several hard months of getting acceleration to work on my HD 
4850, I have a hard decision to make:  leave the HD 5750 installed (no 
accel), or replace it with the HD 4850 (lots of accel) until the next 
round of support starts to appear?


Much thanks,
Dave W.