What to blame for ATI lockups after upgrade ?

[Alex Deucher]

On Dec 28, 2007 5:00 PM, Frédéric L. W. Meunier
<lists2006 at pervalidus.net> wrote:
> I used XOrg 1.4 with ATI driver 6.7.196 without any problems
> for a month. I upgraded to XOrg 1.4.0.90 on december 13 and to
> ATI 6.7.197 on the 21.
>
> On the 22, suddenly, while moving the mouse cursor, nothing
> worked anymore. I could move the mouse, but it was like an "I"
> and didn't do anything. The screen was apparently locked, as
> the clock didn't get updated.
>
> After some time and no results, I decided to do a forced
> reboot. Then, I had the idea to use joyd, a mouse daemon that
> send commands.
>
> Today, I had the same problem while moving the mouse.
>
> One of the joyd commands was "/bin/killall -9 X", but the mouse
> also locked up when it was issued.
>
> The other, "/sbin/reboot", worked, and apparently did a clean
> shutdown, because after a reboot there were no fsck messages
> about "recovery required".
>
> In all above versions, I used the same DRI from Mesa 7.0.2. I
> have a Radeon 9600.

Try disabling the DRI or changing the AGPMode.  the newer ati driver
switched back to AGP 1x mode by default, previous versions defaulted
to whatever mode the bios set.  Both seem to have stability problems
on different cards.

Option "AGPMode" "4"

Alex