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A recent update installed KMS and for awhile everything was fine. However, a subsequent call to pacman -Syu didn't have such an innocuous effect. I have no idea what's going on. I've never seen this before.
X windows and video display in general is fast with KMS enabled; however, something randomly goes very wrong. All of a sudden, my screen appears to be darkening from the edges, moving towards the center, while at the same time everything blurs together and the screen appears to be "oozing" liquid crystal from the top and bottom. Obviously, the machine is totally unresponsive when this happens. It's like a very distressing special effect.
Fortunately, I can manually reboot the machine and get the system back up. So far, this has never happend when working solely in the terminal frame buffer. On the other hand, when I disable KMS via "nomodeset" (or any other tricks mentioned on the wiki or in the forums), all graphical components are incredibly laggy, and it's not like I'm doing any fancy desktop cube, wobbly windows, or compositing of any sort; I'm using Ion, a 1MG tiling window manager.
At any rate, this is very annoying. I've asked for help in the achlinux freenode channel to no avail. I don't even know what kernel version or xorg server version or ati driver version to rollback to. I have always used xf86-video-ati without a single problem; now scrolling, tabbing between windows, switching viewports, etc. lags as if my CPU is constantly maxed out (and it's not).
Could someone please help? Thanks.
My video card is an X300 mobile radeon. Dell inspiron 6000. A couple years old.
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