X logout/restart crashes (AGP/AMD-751/DRM/R128) [SOLVED]

[lost+found]

Hi,

I had logout X crashes for some time. They were actually X restart crashes: when you logout, X is restarted with different permissions for your login manager (KDM in my case). It just looked like X was crashing on logout. Most of the time I saw a black screen with a cross shaped mouse pointer in the middle, and some scrambled colours in the upper part of the screen. Not using KDM (= rc-update del xdm default), and typing startx from the console, the crashes occurred too, but then after logging out from KDE and starting X again, even as a different user. The same using TWM instead of KDE.

Yesterday I had enough of it, because the only workaround is a complete reboot to just change user session in KDE. I tried everything possible, and it seems to be solved now. I did a lot of logouts already and switched between 3 accounts without a crash, freeze, lockup or anything.

Although the versions/software/hardware may be different from your situation, this could be interesting to try. This is what I did/changed:

I just followed the Gentoo Documentation: Gentoo Linux ATI FAQ plus Hardware 3D Acceleration Guide. In last one, it is not mentioned that for a 2.6.6 or above kernel the x11-base/x11-drm ebuilds do work*. So, I removed DRM from the kernel and emerged x11-drm-20050502 instead, just like described for a 2.4 kernel.

[jbinto]

I am experiencing the exact same symptoms.

Upon log out from KDE, display resolution changes (i.e. xorg terminates), display resolution changes again (i.e. xorg restarts), KDM screen starts to paint, window borders are there but it hardlocks just before any text/images are painted. This is reproducible sometimes, but not always. It does happen at least 2 in 3 times.

Same symptoms happen when, on boot, KDM starts and one uses Alt+N to go to the console login. This hardlocks the system on maybe 1 in 5 tries.

Now, I decided against using the radeon module in xorg. I use fglrx. I assume xorg-x11-drm is not meant to be compatible with fglrx but with the built-in radeon module? How does this fix the problem? How can I fix the problem in my case?

At one point, I believed the radeon framebuffer was to blame, thinking Xorg would terminate, it would go to framebuffer mode, then Xorg would start again, causing problems. So I switched to vesafb-tng (which, by the way, cannot seem to output 1280x720 to my 32" widescreen TV... only 4:3), and I thought that solved the problem. Problems seemed fewer, but probably weren't. So I killed framebuffer support entirely, thinking that in between KDE session and KDM the framebuffer got half-started. Now this hasn't fixed the problem.

[nautiazn85]

I got it working using the 2.6.16-gentoo-r3 kernel and ati-drivers-8.23.7.

I'll post more information in a minute.