FS#19138 - xf86-video-ati causes garbled screen on Radeon Mobility M6 LY after update

Attached to Project: Arch Linux
Opened by Michael Hellwig (the_eye) - Saturday, 17 April 2010, 17:04 GMT
Last edited by Andreas Radke (AndyRTR) - Saturday, 17 April 2010, 18:46 GMT
Task Type Bug Report
Category Packages: Extra
Status Closed
Assigned To Jan de Groot (JGC)
Andreas Radke (AndyRTR)
Architecture All
Severity High
Priority Normal
Reported Version
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

Description:
as discussed in the forums here (
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=745088#p745088), the version of xf86-video-ati that got onto our computers a few days ago (6.12.192-1) causes various display problems. Main thing is firefox display being completely garbled and unuseable. This could be fixed by setting AccelMethod to "EXA" in xorg.conf (or by downgrading the driver) but that causes another problem, namely scrolling to be atrociously slow in firefox and cpu-usage to jump to 100% on scrolling (wtf?).

So one can either have an unuseable firefox or an atrociously slow and cpu-hogging firefox, or downgrade the driver.

re KMS: ISTR that when it first came up, I decided to deactivate it because nothing worked any more after activating it. As in, my kernel line in grub.conf has
radeon.modeset=0. I guess this means I'm not using kms?

Apart from that I'm using the xorg.conf from the archlinux wiki (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/IBM_ThinkPad_X31#Xorg_and_direct_rendering). Not using an xorg.conf at all causes a garbled firefox.


Additional info:
* package version(s): xf86-video-ati-6.12.192-1


Steps to reproduce:
have thinkpad x31. start x. start firefox.
This task depends upon

Closed by  Andreas Radke (AndyRTR)
Saturday, 17 April 2010, 18:46 GMT
Reason for closing:  Works for me
Additional comments about closing:  No support for user configuration here. No clear describtion about KMS/UMS, no logs....Use forums for support. Doesn't seem to be a bug.
Comment by Michael Hellwig (the_eye) - Saturday, 17 April 2010, 17:34 GMT
further note: it's not "scrolling in firefox" that causes the cpu to jump to 100% and the Display slow to a crawl but rather updating large screen-areas. E.g. if I have a fullscreen terminal running screen inside it and in various screen-windows a lot of text, and I switch back and forth between them, I'm now also seeing weird interruptions in the flow of things with the cpu jumping to 100%. It didn't do that before. Also, scrolling around in a big text in a maximized terminal running vim.