Re: [gentoo-alpha] radeon questions

[Don Wilburn <bodhisattva@gt.rr.com>]

Thanks for your replies.  Building the radeon driver into the kernel 
seems to work, but trying to make it a module does not (for me anyway).
It makes me wonder if nouveau could work in a similar fashion.

My X crashes were hardware problems.  The early DEC Personal Workstation 
has a DMA problem with its 64-bit PCI slots.  Some well-behaved cards 
work fine, apparently.  This Visiontek card doesn't make that list. 
This is the first time I've had objective proof.  Switching to a 32-bit 
PCI slot fixed my crashes.
Once I found out those 64-bit slots were ordinary PCI. there was no 
reason to put the vido card there anyway.  If they were PCI-X (not 
express), I could have gotten a 66MHz bus at least, but mine are fixed 
at 33.  Boo hoo.

My PNY GeForce 5200 did not cause problems in the bad slot.  Maybe the 
nv driver is too timid to cause a similar problem.  Maybe the hardware 
is less troublesome.  The question is moot.

I let X default to my 17" non-widescreen LCD monitor's 1280x1024 and 
24-bit color.  My first successful start of glxgears yielded about 
60fps.  I'm happy just to see those gears turn at all.

Now I need to figure out something better for my fb.modes file.  The 
framebuffer console text is tiny at 1280x1024.

Adios,  DW