Bad Alloc with Radeon

[Alex Deucher]

On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 6:48 PM, Ken Mandelberg <km at mathcs.emory.edu> wrote:
>
> I'm running an old thinkpad X22 with a
>
> RADEON(0): Chipset: "ATI Radeon Mobility M6 LY (AGP)" (ChipID = 0x4c59)
>  /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//radeon_drv.so
>       compiled for 1.6.0, module version = 6.12.1
>
> I get Bad Alloc running any HD video on Linux. However, on Windows vlc
> manages to play the same video.

The windows driver already has a unified memory manager.  The unified
open source memory manager is still in progress.

>
> Is there any configuration I can do to get past this on Linux.

If you are using a compositing manager (compiz, kwin, metacity, etc.)
you may be hitting a limitation of XAA, so switch to EXA:
Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
If you are really running out of vram (which is easily possible on an
8 MB card) you may want to try the latest kms drm bits since they
provide a real memory manager:
http://jglisse.livejournal.com/1822.html

Alex