Bug 15846

Summary: display horribly rendered with radeon 7200 card on ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy)
Product: xorg Reporter: Tom Horsley <horsley1953>
Component: Driver/RadeonAssignee: xf86-video-ati maintainers <xorg-driver-ati>
Status: RESOLVED INVALID QA Contact: Xorg Project Team <xorg-team>
Severity: normal    
Priority: medium    
Version: 7.3 (2007.09)   
Hardware: x86 (IA32)   
OS: Linux (All)   
Whiteboard:
i915 platform: i915 features:
Attachments:
Description Flags
the full X log file none

Description Tom Horsley 2008-05-06 18:00:11 UTC 
On my brand new ubuntu 8.04 install, the screen contents displayed
by the radeon driver are horrible. It looks somewhat as if it has
decided to render things in 4 bit color. Weirdly, the actual contents
of the framebuffer appear normal. If I take a screenshot and transfer
it to a system with a working display, all appears well.

The (possibly) relevant packages on the system are:

xserver-xorg-video-all 1:7.3+10ubuntu10
xserver-xorg-video-ati 1:6.8.0-1

This is a old radeon 7200 card, but it is not a hardware problem. The
vesa driver renders things quite well (but, of course, 3D is not very
speedy :-).

http://home.att.net/~Tom.Horsley/ubuntu.png is a screen shot (showing
the correctly rendered screen buffer while running with radeon driver).

http://home.att.net/~Tom.Horsley/ubuntu2.png is a photograph I took
of the actual rendering of the screen with the radeon driver. Not only
are the colors wacko, but the text is extremely fuzzy (and not merely
due to being a photograph).

If I switch to the vesa driver, the screen looks like the 1st image
above, so the card is clearly capable of working correctly.

Some selected bits from log file:

X.Org X Server 1.4.0.90
Release Date: 5 September 2007
X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0
Build Operating System: Linux Ubuntu (xorg-server 2:1.4.1~git20080131-1ubuntu9)
Current Operating System: Linux grommit 2.6.24-16-generic #1 SMP Thu Apr 10 13:23:42 UTC 2008 i686
Build Date: 15 April 2008  05:26:17PM

(--) PCI:*(1:0:0) ATI Technologies Inc Radeon R100 QD [Radeon 7200] rev 0, Mem @ 0xd0000000/27, 0xd9000000/19, I/O @ 0x9000/8
Comment 1 Tom Horsley 2008-05-06 18:04:00 UTC 
Created attachment 16401 [details]
the full X log file

Here is the complete log file from the most recent attempt
to run the radeon driver. This is on a different monitor than
the original screenshots were taken from, but the display is
just as screwed up in 1920x1080 as it was as 1280x1024.
Comment 2 Tom Horsley 2008-06-02 07:25:24 UTC 
After looking at this for a while, I'm wondering if the driver is somehow
enabling the color mapping hardware on the 7200 instead of a truecolor mode?
That would certainly wind up with random data being used for the colormap
and produce silly looking output like I see (just a random thought, I
have no idea if it is really the problem).
Comment 3 Alex Deucher 2008-06-02 07:31:10 UTC 
does this option help?

Option "DefaultTMDSPLL" "TRUE"
Comment 4 Tom Horsley 2008-06-02 13:54:38 UTC 
Nope, same ridiculous colors with or without DefaultTMDSPLL.
Comment 5 Christopher M. Penalver 2016-02-24 06:08:33 UTC 
Tom Horsley, Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop went EOL as of May 12, 2011. For more on this, please see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases .

If this is reproducible in a supported release, it will help immensely if you filed a new report with Ubuntu by ensuring you have the package xdiagnose installed, and that you click the Yes button for attaching additional debugging information running the following from a terminal:
ubuntu-bug xorg

Also, please feel free to subscribe me to it.

For more on why this is helpful, please see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs.

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