I forgot to mention: Certain parts of the display still look correct with defaultdepth 16, eg the mouse cursor and video from dragon player (xine backend, VO driver).

I'm pretty sure this is an xserver bug rather than a driver bug.  Can you try an older Xserver?  1.6.x or 1.5.x?

Is it possible to use an older xserver without downgrading the driver as well?

If it is, I may need a few pointers to go about doing so.

Not sure if this is a relevant test, but if I change the driver to vesa in xorg.conf, then I can use defaultdepth 16 or 24 and the colors are correct.

(In reply to comment #3)
> Is it possible to use an older xserver without downgrading the driver as well?
> 
> If it is, I may need a few pointers to go about doing so.
> 

Just build the driver against the older xserver.  
http://wiki.x.org/wiki/radeonBuildHowTo

I reverted to Xorg-server 1.6.3, I also downgraded these packages: xf86-input-evdev xf86-input-mouse xf86-input-keyboard.

Then in order to compile the xf86-video-ati from the 6.12 branch, I had to downgrade libXext to 1.0.5 and xextproto to 7.0.5. After compiling I returned those two packages to current versions.

Now, the bug does not appear. I can run with DefaultDepth 16 and the colors look correct.

(In reply to comment #0)
> Created an attachment (id=33471) [details]
> Image of speculated cause of problem
> 
> Bug:
> When setting "defaultdepth 16" in the Screen section of xorg.conf the display
> looks dim and has a green tint.
> 
> Hardware:
> IBM Thinkpad X32
> Radeon Mobility 7000 aka M6 LY
> 
> Software
> Arch Linux kernel 2.6.32-ARCH
> xorg-server 1.7.5-1
> xf86-video-ati 6.12.4-3
> 
> Additional information:
> In spite of the color issue, the system is completely usable when defaultdepth
> 16 is set. Opengl/DRI is only possible on this card on this setting because of
> the lack of VRAM.

I also have this exact same problem with the same graphics hardware, except that I am running a tuxonice 2.6.33 kernel and a Thinkpad X24.

However, the OP must have better eyes than I do; I find the system completely unusable when DefaultDepth 16 is set.

Compounding this difficulty is the fact that exiting the X server does not restore the colors, so the console fonts are dark green and unreadable too.  The only solution appears to be to reboot.

I wonder if this is related to: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19217

(In reply to comment #6)
> I reverted to Xorg-server 1.6.3, I also downgraded these packages:
> xf86-input-evdev xf86-input-mouse xf86-input-keyboard.
> 
> Then in order to compile the xf86-video-ati from the 6.12 branch, I had to
> downgrade libXext to 1.0.5 and xextproto to 7.0.5. After compiling I returned
> those two packages to current versions.
> 
> Now, the bug does not appear. I can run with DefaultDepth 16 and the colors
> look correct.

Tony,  did you find an old package for xorg-server 1.6.3, or did you recompile it?  If you found an old package, could you tell me where so I can try this solution; I'd like to get acceleration working.

Thanks,

Robert.

(In reply to comment #7)
> Tony,  did you find an old package for xorg-server 1.6.3, or did you recompile
> it?  If you found an old package, could you tell me where so I can try this
> solution; I'd like to get acceleration working.

Well, I used the repository on the page below to get the packages for xorg 1.6.3 that I mentioned.

http://chakra-project.org/bbs/viewtopic.php?id=1829

FYI, I haven't really spent enough time getting everything matched on the same versions. I think, to do this right, you would need to build a lot of packages against the 1.6.3 server. Or perhaps it would be easier to switch to a distribution that used a < 1.7 Xorg server. Otherwise, maybe it would be a good idea to get these into the AUR?

I mostly did what I said above in order to test Alex's point. I have a "stable" setup, but there are a few things that I do not change because I know they will crash, eg high resolutions on external screen with compositing activated, and multi head. Additionally I get a lot of artifacts, some issues with video play back, etc. with compositing on or off. Bottom line though, it seems that if I keep my screen real estate at 1024x768 things are playing together relatively nicely. YMMV.

Just to note that this does not only happen with Thinkpad setups: I have a workstation with a ATI Radeon X550 card running Gentoo Linux (xorg-server-1.7.6, xf86-video-ati-6.12.6). Switching from DefaultDepth 16 to 24 helped.

Before the upgrade to the above versions caused this green problem I had 
xorg-server-1.6.5-r1 and xf86-video-ati-6.12.4 installed where this was not a problem.

Before I found this bug report, I tried to downgrade to an older server, but downgrading xorg-server (and all necessary packages) turned out to be too much work so that I gave up after 3 hours or so... I did succeed in upgrading to xorg-server-1.8.0 and xf86-video-ati-6.13.0 (I think) but as that did not help the problem, I went back to the versions I mentioned at the top.

Fixed in 4651d77211b508cb6b76931807780e317f232220

Verified as fixed with xorg-server 1.9.2, xf86-video-ati 6.13.2. Thanks!