Bringing up GNOME and setting the COSMOS screen saver on a machine with an ATI RN50 video chip present can result in an IERR (system hard lockup). The can be easily reproduced by setting the screen resolution to 1600x1200. After the COSMOS screen saver starts an IERR consistently occurs within the first 3 mins. The COSMOS screen saver setting runs the slideshow program. The failure can also be duplicated by running the slideshow program directly from command line and maximizing the slideshow's window. It appears that the radeon driver is making calls to registers that are used for 3D acceleration.
Does this also happen with Option "RenderAccel" "off"?
Dell and ATI have shown that Option "RenderAccel" "False" will prevent this hang as well as stopping the 3D register accesses via PCI. The problem was seen in SLES10 which had this turned on. Red Hat has this off by default but Dell was also able to show that the failure occurred on RHEL4 U3 with Option "RenderAccel" "True". 3D operations are not supported (and often won't work) on RN50. The SLES10 bugzilla is: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=175564
Created attachment 5778 [details] [review] Disable render acceleration for RN50 chip RN50 doesn't support render acceleration,so submit this patch which disables render acceleration for RN50 chip.
Created attachment 5779 [details] [review] Disable 3D direct rendering support for RN50 chip in 2D driver RN50 doesn't support 3D driect rendering.
Second patch pushed to main xf86-video-ati git repository as is. First patch pushed slightly modified so it's still possible to enable RENDER acceleration with Option "RenderAccel" if the administrator so chooses. Thanks, and regards to the whole ATI Linux team in Markham. :)
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