Broken video drivers in new modular X

[Mike A. Harris]

Sadda Teh wrote:
> Hi all, just writing to say that on my Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop (latest 
> BIOS) with ATI Mobility M4 video the modular X vesa and r128 drivers do 
> not work properly. When X is configured to use the vesa driver it comes 
> up, but the picture is distorted (looks like 2 vertical desktops 
> overlapping one another at various points, also colors are messed up). 
> As for trying to use the r128 driver, X cannot even load when configured 
> this way, it fails with an error along the lines of the r128_drv.so 
> could not be opened. Has anyone else seen issues like this with the new 
> modular X packages? Should I file bugs for these in x.org 
> <http://x.org>'s bugzilla? Thanks.

I think that's a known bug in the r128 driver right now, which can
be worked around by using the "ati" driver wrapper (which should work
for all ATI hardware, by sub-loading the appropriate driver (atimisc,
r128, radeon) after detecting what chip you have.

We normally configure each chip to the specific driver for the chip,
rather than using the 'ati' wrapper, as there were problems with the
wrapper a very long time ago.  Please post back to the list if this
works around the problem for you.

Any video driver lockups/corruption/problems or other core X server
glitches, driver problems, etc. generally should be reported directly
to X.Org, for the driver development team to be made aware of them,
which accelerates bug fixes.

http://bugs.freedesktop.org - in the "xorg" component.


Hope this helps!