Video card debugging info (Mach64, Beige G3)- how to turn it off (Beige G3, YDL 4.0.1 and kernel 2.6.10-1)

[Daniel Gimpelevich]

Like I said below, I believe the flag was turned on intentionally, because
it's the only configurable way to make some ioctl calls get handled. While
the Beige G3 isn't officially supported, the Lombard is, and I think the
Lombard probably uses the same video driver. This video driver issue is
likely not new with the 2.6.10 version, but I haven't verified that
because I no longer have very easy access to 2.6.9 kernel sources. If the
offending code is indeed a holdover from 2.6.9 and earlier, using a driver
with the flag turned off, as the YDL 2.6.9 apparently had, would be
ill-advised as you will periodically have weird and unexplainable problems
that may not always be obviously video-related. TerraSoft doesn't even
test on every single supported model. AFAIK, nobody over there has a
Lombard to try YDL4 on. Since it would be unlikely that they would develop
a kernel patch just to support the Lombard, the people who should receive
debugging dumps when needed would be the maintainers of the kernel driver
for ATI Mach64-based video cards.

I'm curious to know what made it seem to you that Ubuntu officially
supports OW. Their website clearly says on the front page: "The current
Ubuntu release supports Intel x86 (IBM-compatible PC), AMD64 (Hammer) and
PowerPC (Apple iBook and Powerbook, G4 and G5) architectures."
Incidentally, that release also uses a 2.6.10 kernel.

On Sun, 19 Jun 2005 01:44:05 -0400, Eric Dunbar wrote:

> Hmm. I guess who(m?)ever compiled it left a debug flag on for my
> particular graphics card?
> 
> Maybe the best solution would be simply to go back to 2.6.9 since that
> kernal was peforming just fine. It does seem bizarre that debugging
> info would be enabled by default out of the box (though, I guess since
> the Beige isn't officially supported no one would bother testing...
> while I'm thinking about it, perhaps I should just bite the bullet and
> refloormat the HD and install Ubuntu and start fresh (I'm not happy
> with the way I've partitioned things and it seems like Ubuntu
> officially supports OW now)).
> 
> Eric.
> 
> On 6/18/05, Daniel Gimpelevich <daniel at gimpelevich.san-francisco.ca.us> wrote:
>> Whenever the effect of turning on or off various options in any kernel
>> drivers is in doubt, the most definitive way to find out for sure is to
>> look at the kernel source code. I find that a highly convenient way to do
>> that is to point a browser to http://lxr.linux.no and just browse. Of
>> course, it's not as convenient to people who can't make heads or tails of
>> it, so I've now taken a look there regarding this issue myself. I have
>> some bad news: The only configurable way to turn off this undesirable
>> behavior is to turn off the DEBUG flag for the atyfb driver, but
>> unfortunately doing that would also disable all the code that implements
>> several certain ioctl calls to the driver, which would quite likely be a
>> very bad thing. My advice would be to just tolerate this ridiculous
>> verbosity as best you can. IMO, none of the possible solutions would be
>> worth your time or effort.
>> 
>> On Sat, 18 Jun 2005 14:52:40 -0400, Eric Dunbar wrote:
>> 
>> > Hello all, I recently (today) got around to updating my Beige G3's
>> > kernel to 2.6.10-1, and, to adding the line: alias eth0 bmac to:
>> > /etc/modprobe.conf to ensure that networking works.
>> >
>> > Anyway, now I get "debugging" info dumped onto my terminals whenever I
>> > switch to them from vt7. If I switch between vt1 and vt2 (for e.g.) I
>> > don't get this debugging info dumped to the vt, but if I switch back
>> > to vt7 and then back to one of the text vts I do get it dumped (to the
>> > text vt).
>> >
>> > Does anyone know how to turn this behaviour off?
>> >
>> > Thanks, Eric.
>> >
>> > PS This is what the dump looks like (F=hexadecimal value):
>> >
>> > debug atyfb: Mach64 non-shadow register values:
>> > debug 0x2000 FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF
>> > etc.
>> >
>> > debug atyfb: Mach64 PLL register values:
>> > debug 0x00 FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF
>> > etc.
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