JDB> Interesting that this works for you. I have several machines with the JDB> ATI ES1000 rev. 0x02 (RN50) video device: HP DL380G5, HP ML310G4, IBM JDB> x3650, Dell PowerEdge 2850 and they all exhibit the "almost-black-on-black" JDB> video problem when booting a kernel built with the patch applied and JDB> radeondrmkms, etc. enabled.
In case it helps, this works for me with netbsd-10-stable and the one-line change. pcictl(1) says 001:03:0: ATI Technologies ES1000 (VGA display, revision 0x02) Here is the pertaining dmesg block: [drm] initializing kernel modesetting (RV100 0x1002:0x515E 0x103C:0x31FB 0x02). [drm] register mmio base: 0xf5ff0000 [drm] register mmio size: 65536 radeon0: VRAM: 128M 0x00000000E8000000 - 0x00000000EFFFFFFF (64M used) radeon0: GTT: 512M 0x00000000C8000000 - 0x00000000E7FFFFFF [drm] Detected VRAM RAM=80M, BAR=128M [drm] RAM width 16bits DDR Zone kernel: Available graphics memory: 9007199253233986 KiB Zone dma32: Available graphics memory: 2097152 KiB [drm] radeon: 64M of VRAM memory ready [drm] radeon: 512M of GTT memory ready. [drm] GART: num cpu pages 131072, num gpu pages 131072 [drm] PCI GART of 512M enabled (table at 0x00000000451D2000). radeon0: WB disabled radeon0: fence driver on ring 0 use gpu addr 0x00000000c8000000 and cpu addr 0x0xffffa6bfc272f000 [drm] Supports vblank timestamp caching Rev 2 (21.10.2013). [drm] Driver supports precise vblank timestamp query. radeon0: interrupting at ioapic0 pin 23 (radeon0) [drm] radeon: irq initialized. [drm] Loading R100 Microcode [drm] radeon: ring at 0x00000000C8001000 [drm] ring test succeeded in 1 usecs [drm] ib test succeeded in 0 usecs [drm] No TV DAC info found in BIOS [drm] Radeon Display Connectors [drm] Connector 0: [drm] VGA-1 [drm] DDC: 0x60 0x60 0x60 0x60 0x60 0x60 0x60 0x60 [drm] Encoders: [drm] CRT1: INTERNAL_DAC1 [drm] Connector 1: [drm] VGA-2 [drm] DDC: 0x6c 0x6c 0x6c 0x6c 0x6c 0x6c 0x6c 0x6c [drm] Encoders: [drm] CRT2: INTERNAL_DAC2 radeondrmkmsfb0 at radeon0 [drm] Initialized radeon 2.50.0 20080528 for radeon0 on minor 0 radeondrmkmsfb0: framebuffer at 0xe8040000, size 1280x1024, depth 16, stride 2560 wsdisplay0 at radeondrmkmsfb0 kbdmux 1: console (default, vt100 emulation), using wskbd0 Monitor is a trusty old "ViewSonic VPS191s". (I like these because they can still sync-on-green and work with old SGI gear.) Martin Neitzel