My humble thanks to Alex Deucher, Dave Airlie, and the others working on
open source Evergreen support for X Windows.
I purchased a Radeon HD 5750 in February, when the first announcement of
Evergreen KMS support appeared. My purpose was at least to help with
testing, and possibly begin browsing the ATI docs and radeon source code
with the idea of contributing code, or at least code fixes.
Other commitments have prevented me from serious diving into coding so
far -- my only code contribution was to point out a firmware typo back
in April -- and even my testing was infrequent because a bug that caused
a pink line to appear on my HDMI monitor when using KMS (which made me
paranoid about the possibility of damage) was only fixed in the second
half of 2010.
Since August, I have been distracted by the prospect of buying the house
I've been renting for the past decade. I had been keeping up to date
with kernels, xf86-video-ati, mesa, xorg-server, etc., up through about
Aug. 20. On Oct. 24, I finally set aside a day to play around with all
of the software changes I've missed over the past 2 months. A great
deal of Evergreen work happened during that time.
I used git to build various versions of RC 2.6.36 kernels (esp.
drm-radeon-testin), mesa libs, and xf86-video-ati drivers between late
Aug. and late Oct. I saw segfaults, screen corruption, and refusals of
the X server to even start. I was getting depressed, and was expecting
to have to resort to my older HD 4850 card, as I approached the latest
available versions of the software.
It was the very last combination,
kernel 2.6.36 (mainline)
xf86-video-ati 6.13.99 (git commit fc7aa63 of Oct. 24)
mesa 7.10-devel (git commit 70f60c9 of Oct. 24), r600c
that finally gave me a perfectly working system -- no segfaults, no
corruption, no errors or warnings in the log files, etc. In fact, HD
5750 performance seems as good or better in every respect compared to
support for my HD 4850 (which I considered to be perfectly fine).
Believing that it was too good to be true, I decided to stress test the
system for a week before deciding that HD 5750 support was working this
perfectly. I am happy to report that it has been a week, and all of the
software I use daily, and all of the 3D software I have thrown at it to
try to make it stumble, has worked without corruption or segfault or any
other negative consequence.
Nice work, folks!
Thanks again,
Dave Witbrodt
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