Bug 26480

Created attachment 33174 [details]
dmesg

I have an Ubuntu/Karmic 9.10 system (xorg server 1.6.4), radeon module version 6.12.99 with an ATI Mobility Radeon X300 M22 PCI Express card. I used to use the proprietary driver, and had neither stability nor performance problems. With the open-source driver, I have both. I hope that you will be able to help me.

$ lspci | grep VGA
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc M22 [Mobility Radeon X300]

I carefully read through these bugs:
  https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15096
  https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24506
They didn't completely resolve my issues.

1) EXA should be enabled by default for my card. 

At first, all my 3D applications triggered X server lockups almost immediately. The backtrace was:
 (gdb) bt
 #0  0x00c2d422 in __kernel_vsyscall ()
 #1  0x0023d719 in ioctl () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6
 #2  0x002d7b2d in drmIoctl () from /usr/lib/libdrm.so.2
 #3  0x002d7f22 in drmCommandNone () from /usr/lib/libdrm.so.2
 #4  0x00598709 in ?? () from /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//radeon_drv.so
 #5  0x00d89a48 in ?? () from /usr/lib/xorg/modules//libxaa.so
 #6  0x00dcdeac in ?? () from /usr/lib/xorg/modules//libxaa.so
 #7  0x0817fd65 in ?? ()
 #8  0x0816feed in ?? ()
 #9  0x0817000e in miCompositeRects ()
 #10 0x00dcf47b in ?? () from /usr/lib/xorg/modules//libxaa.so
 #11 0x081714f2 in CompositeRects ()
 #12 0x081780a5 in ?? ()
 #13 0x081742e5 in ?? ()
 #14 0x0808d17f in Dispatch ()
 #15 0x08072515 in main ()
I tried a bunch of things, including "nomodeset", "radeon.modeset=0", etc. I finally found a suggestion to try EXA. That got rid of a number of crashes. Then I discovered this line hidden deep inside the log file:
 (II) RADEON(0): XAA Render acceleration unsupported on Radeon 9500/9700 and newer. Please use EXA instead.

I'm attaching X logs for this XAA setup, (1) from the time the crash happened -- I rebooted the system with REISUB, (2) from the boot immediately after the crash.

Can we please make this the default? If the user has not overridden the setting by explicitly writing XAA, make the right choice for them. Putting an II line saying "do this or your system will crash" in a log is hardly a good user experience.


2) Performance and texture issues with EXA. With this setting, my 3D test apps both started "working". They are Neverball and Quake 3 Arena. Performance is abysmal. Q3 at 800x600 refreshes at about 15fps, and stutters badly every second or so. Neverball is just barely playable in an 800x600 window (15-20fps).

Worse yet, the textures in Q3 are completely broken if there scene is complex enough: they cycle through some progression of colors and splotches in a psychedelic progression. A similar bug also shows up in Neverball: some of the objects are supposed to glisten -- but with this driver, they flash entirely white in a fairly rapid strobe.


3) Compiz causes a segfault and X hang with EXA. The log is attached.



I'm very happy to help debug these, just let me know what to do. 

Thanks!