On 07/06/2009 03:29 AM, Mick wrote:
Hi All,
I cleared out some xorg related packages at some point because my machine will
not shutdown without a kernel oops when it is trying to unload the radeon
driver.
Hm. There is no reason to unload any driver or module just to shut down. Are
you sure that's the reason for the oops?
It now seems I can no longer find glxgears/info. What have I
removed that I shouldn't have?
glxgears is part of mesa-progs.
I remember unmerging xorg-x11 (there was advice in this list that this is not
needed when using Fluxbox or other lightweight window managers).
That's a meta-package, which just pulls in a bunch of other packages. Meta-
packages are never needed, they're just for your convenience.
When I moved to x11-base/xorg-server-1.5.3-r* I also unmerged
x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati. I recall concluding at the time that the new
xorg-server did not need such an external driver - is that right?
No, xorg-server will always need a specific driver for a specific video card,
it's just a matter of figuring out which one your card needs. OTOH most cards
will work at a very basic level with just the vesa driver -- but that's most
likely not what you want.
I have set radeon as the video card in my /etc/make.conf, but Xorg.0.log shows
ati_drv.so - should it be so?
# less /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep driver
X.Org XInput driver : 2.1
(==) Matched ati for the autoconfigured driver
New driver is "ati"
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//ati_drv.so
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//radeon_drv.so
(II) AIGLX: enabled GLX_texture_from_pixmap with driver support
# lsmod | grep radeon
radeon 145696 2
drm 141892 3 radeon
I don't know enough about ati products to answer. The xorg-server is pretty
good at picking the right driver by itself. If you type "X -logverbose" at
a command prompt and look at the X logfile you may see that the server has
loaded multiple drivers and then unloads the ones it doesn't need -- strange
behavior but that's the way it's designed, apparently.
