I have this situation. I WAS able to run linux games like Heretic2, Myth2, and Terminus under linux, with hardware acceleration (Radeon 32MB DDR) back in March when I was running Mandrake 7.2, kernel-2.4.2, XFree86-4.0.2, and the March DRI-CVS. All worked great. Now, I have Mandrake 8.0, kernel-2.4.3, XFree86-4.0.3, and a very recent DRI-CVS build. The games don't run, but instead they wreck X. Heretic2 would play on my Mandrake 8.0 system for a while if I ran it out of the box, with no patches (the patches worked fine with Mandrake 7.2). Unlike under Mandrake 7.2 and KDE 2.1, however, fullscreen mode fails to work in 8.0. Instead, the ONLY thing I get close to fullscreen mode, regardless of game settings, is a full-sized window. If started from a simple xterm, no window manager or environment, I get fullscreen gameplay. The unpatched game gets to a point at which it segfaults every time, but this is a game problem...hence the patches. Patching the game renders it totally unrunable in 8.0 but the patches were fine in 7.2. Myth2 ran fine in software mode (the only mode available to non-Voodoo card users at the time) in 7.2 with fullscreen but now in 8.0, with or without hardware rendering (a patch allowing OpenGL acceleration) it refuses to run and segfaults at startup. Terminus ran beautifully with hardware acceleration in 7.2 but now it is the worst of the lot. It crashes at startup and has even managed on a couple of occassions to bring my entire system down (it is OpenGL only). I haven't tried to run it again as a result. Because of the way these games crash, they either give ONLY an unhelpful "segmentation fault" and nothing else, or they lockup X so that even if there were any interesting messages of any use, I never get to see them because the only recourse is to hard reboot because I lose mouse and keyboard input. Terminus and Myth2 are the prime offenders of this type of crash though on a few occassions, I have seen an unhelpful "segmentation fault" from myth2. Civilme in a Mandrake list told me that this was an issue with XFree86-4.0.3 (probably in interacting with the Radeon). This, to me, would appear to then be both an XFree AND a DRI-CVS problem. XFree in some unknown way and DRI in regards to the Radeon driver (?) As I said, I NEVER get any useful log entries or messages on xterms when any of these games go down for the count and there are never any dumped cores. This makes it very hard (for me at least) to try to figure out precisely where the problem lay. Can anyone with perhaps more expertise or knowledge of this whole thing instruct me on ways I might track down the problem? Does anyone know of any specifics about a problem in the recent DRI-CVS code or XFree86-4.0.3 in regards to the Radeon? I hesitate to run strace on one of these games because doing this on gears, a simple, uncomplicated app, brought X down real nicely. I grow weary of hard rebooting my system (and am a bit worried about continuing to do so). The best thing of all would be someone with a similar system who may not be having any of these problems letting me know - and maybe indicating details of their system that might differ from mine. I have an Athlon 700, AOpen AK72 mobo, Via KX133 chipset, 128MB ram, ATI Radeon 32 DDR AGP, Mandrake 8.0 (and the stuff mentioned previously). -- Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain. --
