# propertiary radeon drivers seems to freeze. How to check it?

## molot

Hello

I recently bought a laptop, AMD Puma-based. As some of you might notice in other parts of this Forum, I have quite big number of problems with gentoo on it. False overheating, limited number of cpu frequency scaling, no sound and so on.

I run 64bit OS, 2.6.24 gentoo kernel. My current problem - I've installed proprietary ATI drivers form my Radeon HD 3200. They seemed to work all right. Laptop froze once, but it was after long compiling and I blamed it on the turned off anti-overheating system. So I've added xdm to a runlevel... and that was big mistake. X freezes after few seconds. Sometimes longer, but it's well within 15min of using. it freezes when changing the virtual terminal. xdm stop fails. And stable version of radeonhd opensource drivers does not support my card.

How to check if freezes are caused by the proprietary driver? I'd want to be 100% sure of it.

How to make X stop when I do xdm stop?

Or is there any way to get movies and games accelerated by the opensource driver?

After all this years on Linux I'm writing to You from Vista, and after all that recent pain with Gentoo I have to say I'm slowly starting to like it here. At least everything usually works and Windows haven't go unresponsive one single time. Gentoo scored about 8 frozen screens. Today.

----------

## VinzC

Have you tried xf86-video-ati-6.9.0?

----------

## molot

Nope. I've tried xf86-video-radeonhd-9999 from zen-overlay, as described here, on gentoo-wiki.com. It freezes all the same (yup, I'm sure proprietary kernel module wasn't loaded). Here x.org says that current, git version should work with my card, but no success.

Do you think that xf86-video-ati-6.9.0 might make a difference? And should I get kernel 2.6.25 again? Downgraded to 2.6.24 to satisfy proprietary driver.

I'll try driver you've asked me about. I think I'll do it tomorrow night, without much hope, honestly. But when you are sinking, you'd grab a razor's blade... I just hope my /dev/sda will survive all those nasty, hard shutdowns.

----------

## VinzC

 *molot wrote:*   

> Do you think that xf86-video-ati-6.9.0 might make a difference?

 

Don't know... After all you've got not much to lose  :Wink:  . Seriously it works for me and my Radeon Mobility X1400.

 *molot wrote:*   

> And should I get kernel 2.6.25 again? Downgraded to 2.6.24 to satisfy proprietary driver.

 

I've personally dropped the proprietary driver for good since it was giving me far less 3D performance than the Open Source driver (ati). This ain't no joke indeed. I'm also using Gentoo Sources 2.6.26-r1. Choosing your kernel is a personal matter, I'd say. At least Open Source drivers have no such restriction.

Also try xorg-server-1.5 and the recent mesa-7.1. This is what stopped freezes on my system. Note there are a couple of packages to unmask (~ARCH) though.

----------

## energyman76b

remove the ati scripts fro /etc/acpi and its directories. Then try again. That solved the 'freezing on switch' problem for me.

For X freezing on logout - one workaround I found was hitting ctrl-alt-backspace to log out. No freeze.

----------

## molot

 *VinzC wrote:*   

>  *molot wrote:*   Do you think that xf86-video-ati-6.9.0 might make a difference? 
> 
> Don't know... After all you've got not much to lose  .
> 
> (...)
> ...

 I've tried. ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64" in make.conf, emerge -DuN world, the 3 packages just in versions you mentioned. The screen in X was unreadable (X started by X command, to isolate potential problems with xdm/kdm). It was showing pretty colours that made no sence at all. Ok, they were pretty, but that's not what I wanted. and when I tried to shut it down (ctrl+c on a console), system went unresponsive. Cursor in console blinked all right, but that was all.

Thanx for input so far. I think I'll wait for next, stable version of radeonhd drivers and possibly X. Vista works stable for me now, and when it comes to think about it, what else would I want?

----------

## poolshrk

My HD3200 causes stutters/pauses with kernels 2.6.25 and 2.6.26, I've tried ati-drivers 8.512, 8.522, and 8.532.  Kernel 2.6.24 series seem to work fine, however i still have the video tearing problem that I've always had.

----------

## molot

Sadly, with kernels prior to 2.6.25 frequency stepping can freeze one or two cores once and then (kondemand, or what is it's name in "top", can use up to 100% of a core or two to the point that renders it unusable, and conservative only seems to lock that way always both cores at a time). I don't know if it's something I'm doing wrong, or is that just the case that AMD ZM-80 CPU is newer than 2.6.24 kernel and somewhat incompatible...

As far as I was able to investigate, that's the real cause of a problem I started this thread about. I'm not going to mark the thread [SOLVED], however. I'll do it when I'll be able to watch a whole movie and run a hour-long analysis with varying CPU usage without a system freeze. Until then, the problem is simply unsolved, as the damn thing does not work.

----------

