Radeon 7500

[Ron McCall]

On Sat, Sep 07, 2002 at 03:08:29PM -0400, Stefan Bruda wrote:
> I have had a similar message (mine refers to "ATY,Crown_B," but the
> idea is the same) for as long as I had my Radeon card, but I just
> ignored it, as it is quite right: my guess is that the OF has room for
> another card which is simply not there on my machine.  It does not
> appear to refer to a video connector, these are detected a bit later
> by the radeonfb kernel driver:
> 
>     radeonfb: DVI port LCD monitor connected
>     radeonfb: CRT port no monitor connected

On my G4/800, BlueStone_A and BlueStone_B definitely seem to refer to
the two connectors on the card.  There is a display-type property for
each and the one for BlueStone_A says "LCD" while the other says "NONE"
(no CRT connected at the moment).  I also dumped the EDID property and
saw "Apple Cinema Display" in the one in BlueStone_A.

> In terms of settings, I boot with no video arguments (my day to day
> boot arguments used to contain only "hdc=ide-scsi" since I use SCSI
> emulation for my DVD/CD/CD-W drive, with the new benh kernels not even
> this is necessary), which I believe is equivalent to OF video.  By the
> way, I was under the impression that OF video just means that the
> video settings are read from OF, the kernel driver fires up anyway, am
> I right?

I haven't tried omitting the video= option.  I will try that to see what
happens.  I really don't quite know what is really meant by Open
Firmware video versus a specific driver.  I've seen some talk about it
and it seems that maybe there is a generic driver built into
Open Firmware that can be used in lieu of a more specific driver for
your particular video card.

> In X, I do use the "UseFBDev" option, in fact I have to: the X display
> shows a legible image without it but it is not usable in the long run
> (there are some lines and reflexions, which is of course no fun).  I
> had to insert a new mode line for my display in XF86Config even if
> XFree86 4.2 is said to be modeline-free.  In any case, X works well
> with "UseFBDev."  The only problem I had is that sometimes the image
> gets shaky after switching VTs or after (re)starting the X server.
> But then I switch the VTs back and forth a couple of times (at most)
> and this fixes the problem.

I haven't yet tried re-enabling "UseFBDev" now that video=radeon:dfp
"works" (i.e. doesn't produce a blank screen).  I will try that too to
see if anything has changed there.

> Oh, yeah, all of these are invariant with the kernel, provided that
> the kernel is a reasonably new one.  In particular, I did not notice
> any difference in this respect between the stock YDL 2.3 kernel
> (2.4.19-4a) and the ones I have been using recently (benh rsync
> 2.4.19+, currently 2.4.20-pre5-ben0 or something).  The benh kernels
> are custom build on my machine, but I guess it doesn't really matter
> as the same thing happened with the 2.4.19-4a which I did not compile
> myself.  (Incidentally though, benh kernels work better for me in a
> number of other respects, so I do recommend them over the YDL kernel.)

Dan Burcaw suggested I try a BenH kernel and I will but it will be a few
days before I can do that.

> Ron, I hope this helps, at least by eliminating some possible causes
> for your problem.  Should you believe that I could be of further help
> do not hesitate to get back to me.

Thanks!  I really appreciate your help!

Ron McCall