ATI Radeon 9200 crashes with Gutsy driver

The offending driver version: 6.6.193

Thanks for your bug report. Can you please try the newer ati driver from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XorgOnTheEdge and see if it works? That package will soon be in Gutsy.

Also dies within few minutes. It appears that the system is quite happy except there are no updates to the on-screen picture nor can I use input devices. But shutdown with power button works fine.

Also this driver does not do 1152x864. It is probably missing this built-in mode at any usable frequency.

Can you try with the last updates and the -tv6 driver, to see if the mode issue is resolved?

If the crashes are avoided with BusType PCI, the issue is probably the flaky agp support seen by many people.

With the latest driver released in Gutsy (6.7.193 and 6.7.194) the resolution issue is resolved. I am no sure what is -tv6.

I meant the xserver-xorg-video-ati 1:6.7.194-1ubuntu1tv6 from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XorgOnTheEdge

Yes, the modesetting still works with that. I do not see anything about accel in the changelog so I guess there is no change to this bug.

I think that is not problem with drivers. Upgrading to gutsy Xgl is enbled by default. You use 9200 and there is no need for Xgl because 9200 work fine with open source drivers. (Driver "ati"). Try this:

mkdir ~/.config/xserver-xgl

touch ~/.config/xserver-xgl/disable

Damir, Xgl is not installed by default. If you have installed it, it is enabled. I don't think Michal is using Xgl. He is for sure using "ati".

Michal, did you try BusType PCI? And the latest test drivers?

yes, I am running one of the Gutsy drivers (possibly not the latest one) with BusType PCI.

I've got a similar problem with the ati driver on gusty (final release), it may be the same as you have. How does lock ups manifest themselves? Can you still move the mouse but it won't do anything or is it a downright freeze? If you've got some audio (like music) does it continue like normal or does it stop or start looping?

I've got the same problem. The display freezes as KDM starts up. The mouse pointer can still be moved, but I cannot use Ctrl+At+F* to switch to console.

Version 6.7.195+git20071026-0ubuntu0tv from http://ppa.launchpad.net/tormodvolden/ubuntu/pool/main/x/xserver-xorg-video-ati did not fix the problem. Reverting back to 6.6.3-2ubuntu6 from fiesty did get my desktop back up and working.

I've got the same problem, with an old ATI AGP card (Kubuntu). The crash is random, but, as previously stated, does appear to be exacerbated by using Firefox. X.org goes to 100% CPU usage - I can still ssh to the machine, but it's horrendously slow. The mouse pointer moves, but the keyboard is dead (can't toggle caps lock even) and the screen is otherwise frozen. It once happened while NoteEdit was playing a score via timidity, and the music continued as if nothing was amiss. And NoteEdit highlights notes while it is playing.

Thank you for the advice to revert the driver - I shall do this later. It's very disappointing that a distribution upgrade has caused such a serious problem.

The card is a Radeon 7200 by the way - told you it was old!

FYI for me the problem is fixed by adding

        Option "BusType" "PCI"
or
        Option "AGPMode" "1"

into the device section of xorg.conf

Michal, do you have an AGP mode setting in your BIOS?

Michal Suchanek , does it depend on if you've got an AGP or PCI card?

I only use AGP cards. I would expect PCI cards do not suffer from this problem because they always run in PCI mode. There is no setting for AGP speed in the BIOS.

AFAIK, there are a couple of similar bugs out there. First this one for AGP cards which is fixed by running PCI mode instead. Then there's a bug for PCI cards which obviously have no choice of mode (bug #114520). If that same bug also affects some AGP cards, I don't know. Some people only see issues after resume from hibernation or sleep.

There used to be a bug when the AGP speed in BIOS mismatched the one in the driver, but the driver has now been fixed to use the BIOS one by default (bug #67487).

There could be a mother bug that causes all of these issues, but it's likely they have different origins and must be taken care of one by one. It can be in the card driver, the mesa libraries or the kernel drm modules.

Thank you for your suggestion Michal - so far it's working fine for me, and I don't have the permanent exclamation mark in Kubuntu from stopping the package manager updating the driver. Do the two options do exactly the same thing? I used the second one in the vain hope that the card would be a little faster than vanilla PCI!

Yes, AGP x1 (or any use of AGP) should be faster than plain PCI.

Thanks!

I got it working by setting agp mode in the bios to 4 (8 did give worse performance with glxgears and crashed with tremulous), set the AGP apature size to 128 MB in the bios and added Option "AGPMode" "4" to xorg.conf and set. According to lspci I've got a "VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV350 AP [Radeon 9600]", it got 128 MiB of memory and was sold as a card with an ATi Radeon 9600 Pro chipset.

Hi,

I have the exact same problem here (ATI Radeon 9200 crashes, with only the mouse working). It was working fine with Fiesty (no visual affects), and hasn't since I upgraded to Gutsy (got visual affects working - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver).

I'm new to Ubuntu, so could someone please give me the steps I would need to do to revert back to the previous version of xorg (Reverting back to 6.6.3-2ubuntu6 from fiesty, was mentioned above), without completely screwing up my Ubuntu installation.

Also how does this affect the "visual affects" of Ubuntu; I enabled Compiz the other day.

Thank you, any help is much appreciated.

Alistair, if you have the exact same problem, there's no need to downgrade. Just adjust the AGP mode in BIOS and/or xorg.conf.

Oh, thank you thank you thank you!!!
I set the following in my BIOS

AGP 4x mode : 2x

and then set "AGPMode" to "2" and so far so good!

Now i just have to work out how to put all my desktops onto a cube!

Thank you so much...

I can confirm this bug on an ATI Radeon 9200 - I had it in Gutsy, and it's been exactly the same in Hardy. On booting up, the login screen is distorted with only the cursor available.

As with others, adding <code>Option "AGPMode" "4"</code> to xorg.conf allows X to work properly again.

It is currently unknown how to fix this.

The change in the radeon driver fixed some configurations that required manual setting but broke some other configurations so that manual setting of the AGP mode is required.

I have no idea about AGP but my suspicion is that the radeon AGP driver authors did not reverse engineer enough of the original driver to set up the AGP mode flawlessly in all cases, and rely on the BIOS to do part of the work.

The card than has to be used in the mode for which the BIOS set it up, and it is not always obvious which mode it is, especially with some buggy BIOSes.

Thanks - if possible could someone check if this issue also affects Intrepid?

On my Intrepid the bug is still present. I have a 7200. Putting Option "AGPMode" "4" (in the bios I've set AGP mode to 4) doesn't help, too. But I used the vanilla Intrepid xorg.conf to add these lines, I will try with a good old manually configured xorg.conf.

I still have a lot of freezes with this xorg.conf. Should I specify the radeon drivr in the device section and so on ?

Guillaume, did you try "1" and "2" also? If you see in Xorg.0.log that the radeon driver is used, you don't have to specify it.

Hello Tormod,

Yes I now have "1" which is the "least worse" mode. It gives me less freezes (but more segfaults of my opengl apps, it's still better since I come back to my desktop). But it still freezes (screen, keyboard & mouse input, keyboard leds blinking).

For the radeon driver it's indeed loaded :
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//radeon_drv.so
(II) Module radeon: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
 compiled for 1.5.1, module version = 6.9.0
 Module class: X.Org Video Driver
 ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 4.1
(II) RADEON: Driver for ATI Radeon chipsets:
...

Guillaume, please file your own bug report, where you attach full logs and conf files.

2008/12/14 Guillaume Duveau <email address hidden>:
> *** This bug is a duplicate of bug 133192 ***
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/133192
>
> Hello Tormod,
>
> Yes I now have "1" which is the "least worse" mode. It gives me less
> freezes (but more segfaults of my opengl apps, it's still better since I
> come back to my desktop). But it still freezes (screen, keyboard & mouse
> input, keyboard leds blinking).
>
> For the radeon driver it's indeed loaded :
> (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//radeon_drv.so
> (II) Module radeon: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
> compiled for 1.5.1, module version = 6.9.0
> Module class: X.Org Video Driver
> ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 4.1
> (II) RADEON: Driver for ATI Radeon chipsets:
> ...
>

This looks like a different problem.

The lockups due to wrong AGP mode either lock up the card only or
perhaps the whole machine sometimes (not sure) but they do not affect
application crashes nor do they cause kernel panics (blinking keyboard
leds).