[gentoo-user] Re: Advice about ati-drivers? [50% SOLVED]

[walt]

On 04/03/2012 04:28 AM, Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
 
> You cannot use two drivers at once.  Either use the kernel driver
> (which does KMS), or ati-drivers.

Thanks Nikos, that's the part that (apparently) the gentoo wiki
doesn't emphasize enough, because my googling has found dozens of
us confused gentoo Radeon users making the same mistakes over and
over.  (And along the way I discovered that you've been saying the
same thing over and over :)

Just two more comments, now that I have the ati-drivers working:

First, I forgot to use eselect opengl to select the ati version
instead of the xorg version.  That helped a lot :p

Second, although I realize now that I didn't need kernel drm
support in the first place, there is definitely a bug in the
drm kernel code somewhere.  Even after I finally got the firmware
to load properly I still got a "EDID not available" error in dmesg,
and hence the black screen during boot.

A real problem was that the EDID error was not clearly flagged
as an error, so I overlooked it until I stumbled across a post
from years ago in this mailing list from someone who didn't miss
it. (Thanks to that person, who's name I've forgotten already.)

Now that I have the ati-drivers working I, of course, am losing
interest in kernel drm support and how to prod someone into
fixing it.  Shame on me...