As a parting comment, this was awful enough and lasted long enough that I was forced to drop 6450s in the affected hardware, so I don't know if any of that was resolved.
I will note the following for those in the same boat: a) Dropping in Radeon 6450s did solve it and they were "only" $30 or so with careful shopping at that time, probably less now that they only have half the performance of an A8's integrated GPU. b) Dropping in 6450s did generate enough heat and power stress in combination to take out the aged capacitors in one of the two machines, forcing an upgrade, which forced the issue of upgrading the other machine to match. If you're upgrading an old machine with a fanless card and there's no case fan in the usual "near the card cage" position, I would suggest adding one for the extra $4 or so for insurance or rubber-chicken facto. At least, in my minimal sample of these 2 machines and 2 similar Socket AM2 boxes with case fans (~80-90mm low-RPM 'silent' types) it was only one of the fanless boxes that hit death. (I will also note that the dead box had a standard 'old fashioned' power supply with a small exhaust fan and mostly slots on the back, while the boxes with no trouble have all had the 'modern' style with a large 120mm fan pulling air up across the board from the bottom. In a marginal situation this might be enough to keep things alive until the hardware is obsolete for other reasons.) c) Fingers crossed, thus far I have not been bitten with too much bitrot in the 6450 support and I believe they are recent enough to still be a target for the ongoing improvements in the open-source driver.. this year, at least. fglrx still supports them right now. d) If I had realized Socket FM2 was a dead-end at the time I ended up having to buy new machines as a result of this saga, I would've been even more annoyed. If something's gone wrong now and you're still standing by AMD, do make sure you end up with something FM2+ (not plain FM2) so upgrades to anything interesting will be possible. The Unity/Libre/Firefox stack has been gradually bloating such that the maximum 2GB in the old machines was not going to support standard browsing/multiple-documents-and-reference-PDFs-open-at-once office tasks for much longer anyway. It is never fun to be forced to upgrade hardware solely for reasons of bitrot. While I think AMD ex-ATI has better intentions of providing good and stable FOSS/*NIX support for chips of roughly the vintage of the 6450 and later, and I sure appreciate what a nightmare maintaining X.org support must be (I was also 'bitten' by the rot of support for the 'well-supported' Matrox G200 at the end of the AGP era)... I will post grumpily grumpy about this to the extent that it might shame anyone into not letting the decay repeat quite so badly in the future. (There seemed to be initial good intentions with the RS480 and 780G, but breakage in support for both forced me to invest in a lot of 6450s... even when they had previously been quite adequate and the only "3D" app in use was Unity itself. It does leave the customer feeling like a sucker and I can no longer say I've had no problems maintaining a business on AMD... even if I did get to sit out a dozen different incompatible Intel CPU socket 'generations' in the time this hardware lasted, and enjoy switching from the original Semprons to some of the last Athlon 64x2 parts when the former could no longer cut it.) -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to xserver-xorg-video-ati in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1181355 Title: R300 (RS480): Intermittent flickering corruption top half of display (VGA, 1080p) Status in “xserver-xorg-video-ati” package in Ubuntu: Incomplete Bug description: [Edit of an edit: _Thought_ issue was narrowed down to Something Bad Happening when the display goes to sleep until firing up LibreOffice and maximizing it just reproduced it in a session before the display could go to sleep. This voids my 'oh, I can narrow this down to a display sleep issue' in comment #7.] Any suggestions where to start welcome: Compaq SR1611NX desktop, "Radeon Xpress 200" RS480 (R300) graphics. HP LV2311 LCD connected via VGA because that's the only output on this hardware. The VGA output used to be a little "less than perfectly stable" with older X.org (versions shipped from Ubuntu 9.x to 10.x). Unknown improvements since then have made the overall display much more stable - no more shifty horizontal flicker. In tradeoff, now the top half of the display occasionally flashes distractingly for fractions of a second (single frames?) with "memory cruft" as you might expect to see during boot or graphics init - generally offset large "checkerboard"-esque blocks of black and color with no obvious relation to what's on the display. This would seem to suggest it's an actual GPU/driver issue rather than a glitch on the VGA/monitor end of things. No idea how to trigger or reproduce other than that it will generally occur at least once within each 15 minutes or so of use. Expanding and retracting the dash (very slowly due to the current regression - takes about 5+ seconds to fade in and dismiss) will sometimes set it off, however. Recommendation for screen-recording software to see if it turns up "in software" short of pointing an actual camera at the screen? ProblemType: Bug DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.04 Package: xserver-xorg-video-ati 1:7.1.0-0ubuntu2 ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.8.0-21.32-generic 3.8.8 Uname: Linux 3.8.0-21-generic x86_64 .tmp.unity.support.test.0: .tmp.unity.support.test.1: ApportVersion: 2.9.2-0ubuntu8 Architecture: amd64 CompizPlugins: No value set for `/apps/compiz-1/general/screen0/options/active_plugins' CompositorRunning: compiz CompositorUnredirectDriverBlacklist: '(nouveau|Intel).*Mesa 8.0' CompositorUnredirectFSW: true CurrentDmesg: Error: command ['sh', '-c', 'dmesg | comm -13 --nocheck-order /var/log/dmesg -'] failed with exit code 1: comm: /var/log/dmesg: Permission denied Date: Fri May 17 13:56:33 2013 DistUpgraded: Fresh install DistroCodename: raring DistroVariant: ubuntu ExtraDebuggingInterest: Yes GraphicsCard: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RS480 [Radeon Xpress 200 Series] [1002:5954] (prog-if 00 [VGA controller]) Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device [103c:2a26] MachineType: ASUSTeK Computer INC. RS482-SB400 MarkForUpload: True ProcEnviron: TERM=xterm PATH=(custom, no user) XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set> LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SHELL=/bin/bash ProcKernelCmdLine: BOOT_IMAGE=/vmlinuz-3.8.0-21-generic root=/dev/mapper/Gins_HD-root ro quiet splash vt.handoff=7 SourcePackage: xserver-xorg-video-ati UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install) dmi.bios.date: 01/25/2007 dmi.bios.vendor: Phoenix Technologies, LTD dmi.bios.version: 3.15 dmi.board.name: Amberine M dmi.board.vendor: ASUSTek Computer INC. dmi.board.version: 1.03 dmi.chassis.type: 3 dmi.chassis.version: 1111 dmi.modalias: dmi:bvnPhoenixTechnologies,LTD:bvr3.15:bd01/25/2007:svnASUSTeKComputerINC.:pnRS482-SB400:pvr:rvnASUSTekComputerINC.:rnAmberineM:rvr1.03:cvn:ct3:cvr1111: dmi.product.name: RS482-SB400 dmi.sys.vendor: ASUSTeK Computer INC. version.compiz: compiz 1:0.9.9~daily13.04.18.1~13.04-0ubuntu1 version.ia32-libs: ia32-libs N/A version.libdrm2: libdrm2 2.4.43-0ubuntu1 version.libgl1-mesa-dri: libgl1-mesa-dri 9.1.1-0ubuntu3 version.libgl1-mesa-dri-experimental: libgl1-mesa-dri-experimental N/A version.libgl1-mesa-glx: libgl1-mesa-glx 9.1.1-0ubuntu3 version.xserver-xorg-core: xserver-xorg-core 2:1.13.3-0ubuntu6 version.xserver-xorg-input-evdev: xserver-xorg-input-evdev 1:2.7.3-0ubuntu2b2 version.xserver-xorg-video-ati: xserver-xorg-video-ati 1:7.1.0-0ubuntu2 version.xserver-xorg-video-intel: xserver-xorg-video-intel 2:2.21.6-0ubuntu4 version.xserver-xorg-video-nouveau: xserver-xorg-video-nouveau 1:1.0.7-0ubuntu1 xserver.bootTime: Fri May 17 13:36:36 2013 xserver.configfile: default xserver.devices: input Power Button KEYBOARD, id 6 input Power Button KEYBOARD, id 7 input PIXART USB OPTICAL MOUSE MOUSE, id 8 input AT Translated Set 2 keyboard KEYBOARD, id 9 xserver.errors: xserver.logfile: /var/log/Xorg.0.log xserver.version: 2:1.13.3-0ubuntu6 xserver.video_driver: radeon To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-ati/+bug/1181355/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
