Mageia 3 and ATI radeon issues

[heymanj]

Was successfully running Mageia 1 (64 bit) on the following hardware

AMD Phenom II x6
12 GB Memory
1TB disk
ATI 4290 on board video (128MB dedicated memory)

running KDE UI

Installed Mageia 3 (64 bit) on the same hardware (new partition on the disk) and have recently started seeing lockup/freezes on the KDE UI. I can successfully log in on the network, and see very little activity, but am unable to get the graphics to restart w/o reboot. This occurs every ~4 days. Prior to the 4th day, I will see momentary lock ups (up to 5min) and then things will progress as expected. I've seen this manifest itself when I use Opera (browser), Chromium (browser), and display (graphical viewer).

At first I thought it was Opera, but it occurs whether I run it or not. Then I thought it was the version of flash plugin I was running, but even upgrading to the latest hasn't stopped the lockups.

Thoughts/suggestions?

jerry

[isadora]

~topic moved by moderator

[pete910]

What driver are you using?

Running an X6 also but got a HD5870, with no issues , that's using the cat driver though.

Pete

[heymanj]

What driver are you using?

Running an X6 also but got a HD5870, with no issues , that's using the cat driver though.

Pete

Code: Select all

[jerry@unix ~]$ sudo lsmod | grep radeon
radeon                941949  3
i2c_algo_bit           13413  1 radeon
drm_kms_helper         44905  1 radeon
ttm                    83601  1 radeon
drm                   281123  5 ttm,drm_kms_helper,radeon
i2c_core               40397  6 drm,i2c_piix4,drm_kms_helper,i2c_algo_bit,radeon,videodev


If I log in from another machine, and kill -9 on startkde, I eventually get the kdm login window again.

What is the 'cat' driver? I'm using what the default installation put in place.

jerry

[pete910]

Apologies, The cat driver refers to the proprietary AMD driver known as Catalyst.

Seems your using the open source driver, The AMD driver is the fglrx kernel module when in use.

With yours been the older card, the last driver of there's that supports yours is Catalyst 13.1

If you haven't already you'll need to enable the non-free repos in rpmdrake via media manager in the options menu .


After that open mcc and go to "Hardware" >> "Set up graphical desktop"
Click " Graphics driver" and pick the "4870 or earlier" It will more than likely have picked the correct one for you already
It will ask if you wish to use the proprietary, then follow the steps to finish.


Pete.

[heymanj]

No question about proprietary driver

It appears I would have to install the dkms, the modified kernel, and the X-fglrx specific binary.

I get paranoid about using proprietary drivers, but if this lockup continues, 12.104 version will be my next option.

[heymanj]

I've switched over from KDE to Xfce and have not seen the lockup.

I figured that moving to the proprietary driver was a big step, so I'd try one other windowing system before then, Xfce.

I've also reported an issue to Opera development as it appears they have an issue with the latest flash player plugins - sending my machine into a huge CPU utilization. That CPU utilization occurrs under KDE and Xfce, so I know that it isn't window manager related.