Bug 15395

Summary:	Problems with radeon M300 and external display
Product:	xorg	Reporter:	Mads Kiilerich <mads>
Component:	Driver/Radeon	Assignee:	xf86-video-ati maintainers <xorg-driver-ati>
Status:	RESOLVED NOTABUG	QA Contact:	Xorg Project Team <xorg-team>
Severity:	normal
Priority:	medium
Version:	6.8.0
Hardware:	x86 (IA32)
OS:	Linux (All)
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Mads Kiilerich 2008-04-07 14:55:44 UTC

Dell D610 laptop with Radeon Mobility M300, Fedora 8 with xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.8.0-1.fc8 with radeon_drv.so. I have an external screen attached. 

1. Dual screen doesn't work; best case is that both displays show the same output. When in BIOS and in Linux text-mode nothing is shown on external display, but when entering graphics mode the external display is enabled. (Yes, I'm running newest BIOS version, and it can't be changed from BIOS.) Apparently the hardware or BIOS is broken, but the X driver does something that almost makes it work.

2. Playing for example ogg video in "any" player shows the video on the internal screen only - on the external display the area is black. For example flash or zattoo is shown correctly on both displays. I assume that ogg uses some hardware decoding functionality which isn't routed correctly.

(I now realize that Fedora 8 carries an old version. I haven't tested newer versions. If you can use the report anyway then fine. Otherwise feel free to discard it.)

Comment 1 Alex Deucher 2008-04-07 15:07:54 UTC

both screens are enabled.  Clone mode is the default setup.  Use xrandr to enable dualhead:
xrandr --output VGA-0 --right-of LVDS
if the default desktop size is not big enough you'll have to add a virtual line to the screen section of your config.
See this page for more info:
http://www.intellinuxgraphics.org/dualhead.html

When using the overlay with Xv, it can only be sourced to one crtc at a time so it will only show up on one head.  you can switch which head the overlay is sourced to using he XV_CRTC Xv attribute and a utility like xvattr.
xvattr -a XV_CRTC -v 1
or
xvattr -a XV_CRTC -v 0

Comment 2 Mads Kiilerich 2008-06-25 13:43:42 UTC

Alex, you were right. Thanks for your insight.

I was mislead by Fedora 8 configuration tools which configured multiscreen some way which didn't work. I thought it was right doing it without Xrandr. But using Xrandr it worked in Fedora 8, and in Fedora 9 the configuration tools works better.

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