radeonhd blank screens

[Will Dyson]

On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 11:13 PM, tsuraan <tsuraan at gmail.com> wrote:
> I just picked up a new radeon 4650 with two dvi ports to replace my
> previous card, but I'm having some troubles.  Basically, the radeon
> appears to work perfectly in console mode (even if I try KMS), but
> when I try to start X, it blanks both screens and never progresses
> from there.  no window manager is started, my X process has no child
> processes, strace just gives an endless loop of these six lines:

I've got a 4650 as well. It is working very well with xf86-video-ati
at git tip and xorg-server at 1.7.3.

I was never able to make the radeonhd driver work for me, so if you
are still using that (not clear from your later messages), I suggest
switching to the regular radeon driver.

I seem to recall having a similar problem when I first got my card. It
turned out to be my xorg.conf, which had served me faithfully for many
years. I think it was something  in the Screen section, which looked
very similar to yours (produced by Debian's xorg.conf generator
script). I removed my xorg.conf entirely, and it started working
perfectly (at which point I lost all motivation to pinpoint the cause
of the bug). I suppose I should try to reproduce it and report it one
of these days, since I'm sure it will hit others.

In the absence of an xorg.conf file, I'm not sure which of radeon or
radeonhd the server will pick, so uninstalling radeonhd may be the way
to go.

-- 
Will Dyson