You are not logged in.

#1 2011-06-14 00:29:11

Wash Your Bowl
Member
Registered: 2011-05-21
Posts: 8

[SOLVED] ATI Radeon X1270 - xf86-video-ati - Screen Distortion

Ok here's the story.

Ever since I've started using Linux about 6 months ago I've been plagued by graphics card issues.  I have a Gateway Lt3103u with a Radeon x1270 graphics card.  This card has been the bane of my existence ever since migrating to linux.  No matter what I do I seem to always have problems.

Edit* I'm using xorg and the open source driver xf86-video-ati
Edit2* My window manager is openbox

I just did a fresh Arch install, I screwed up a few small things in my first install and after a month decided to try again from scratch, and like usual I had screen issues right away.  Like every time before my screen flickered and I had horizontal lines dancing across my screen.  This is no problem I just edited /boot/grub/menu.lst to look like this:

 # (0) Arch Linux
title  Arch Linux
root   (hd0,5)
kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/sda5 ro radeon.new_pll=0
initrd /kernel26.img

Reboot flickering goes away. 

The second issues is one I've never found a fix for and never been able to accurately explain enough to get a proper diagnosis.  This was a problem when I used Ubuntu and my first arch install. 
After a certain (completely random) amount of time all the text in certain windows will look like this
Link to Screenshot

This doesn't things affect things like webpages or pdfs.  Only system text (I don't know if that's it's real name; kinda just made that up); for example my openbox menu, the title bar of any window, thunar...
If that doesn't make sense here's another example.  Right now, the address bar of chromium is completely unreadable but I can view webpages and post on the arch linux forum without a problem.

*Disclaimer* This may not be related to my graphics card.
Another problem I've had since Ubuntu is my computer randomly freezing.  My computer will be running fine than all of a sudden *boom* complete screen lock.  Keyboard is non-responsive and my only option is to use the power button.  This hasn't happened since my fresh install and I think the problem seemed to be wicd in my first Arch installation.  This still doesn't explain why it happened in Ubuntu... well then again there were a lot of things that happened I couldn't explain when I was using Ubuntu. 

I don't even know where to begin addressing this issue.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.
What outputs do you need?

Edit3* I forgot to mention it gets progressively worse.  Here's another screenshot
My Screen Fails

Last edited by Wash Your Bowl (2011-06-17 17:16:38)


Joshu asked, “Have you eaten your rice porridge? The monk replied, “I have eaten.”
Joshu said, “Then you had better wash your bowl.”  At that moment the monk was enlightened.
"Consciousness is the ground of all being." - Dr. Amit Goswami
Registered Linux User #535772

Offline

#2 2011-06-14 03:20:26

ewaller
Administrator
From: Pasadena, CA
Registered: 2009-07-13
Posts: 19,739

Re: [SOLVED] ATI Radeon X1270 - xf86-video-ati - Screen Distortion

Nothing Concrete, but a few questions.

What are you using as a monitor?
What desktop manager are you using (or are you)?
Are you using a compositor?


Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature -- Michael Faraday
Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine. -- Alan Turing
---
How to Ask Questions the Smart Way

Offline

#3 2011-06-14 04:21:27

Wash Your Bowl
Member
Registered: 2011-05-21
Posts: 8

Re: [SOLVED] ATI Radeon X1270 - xf86-video-ati - Screen Distortion

I'm using the standard monitor that came with my laptop.  Here's a link to the specs of my computer:
Complete Computer Specs

I just did a fresh install and this is all I have installed thus far.  I figured I'd try and figure this out before I started installing a lot of programs. 

alsa-utils 
alsa-oss
xorg
mesa
xf86-video-ati
hal
dbus
xf86-input-{evdev,synaptics}
openbox
obconf
obmenu
lxappearance
thunar
leafpad
chromium  

Joshu asked, “Have you eaten your rice porridge? The monk replied, “I have eaten.”
Joshu said, “Then you had better wash your bowl.”  At that moment the monk was enlightened.
"Consciousness is the ground of all being." - Dr. Amit Goswami
Registered Linux User #535772

Offline

#4 2011-06-14 15:08:22

ewaller
Administrator
From: Pasadena, CA
Registered: 2009-07-13
Posts: 19,739

Re: [SOLVED] ATI Radeon X1270 - xf86-video-ati - Screen Distortion

Nothing overly remarkable there.  Could you reboot, start X, then post a copy your dmesg output and the contents of /var/log/Xorg.0.log  ??

They are may be large, so consider using something like pastebin.
I suspect your card uses shared memory, and that memory is not being allocated properly.  I don't know what to do about it (yet), but it is interesting.


Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature -- Michael Faraday
Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine. -- Alan Turing
---
How to Ask Questions the Smart Way

Offline

#5 2011-06-14 16:58:46

Wash Your Bowl
Member
Registered: 2011-05-21
Posts: 8

Re: [SOLVED] ATI Radeon X1270 - xf86-video-ati - Screen Distortion

Dmesg

/Var/log/xorg.0.log

Last edited by Wash Your Bowl (2011-06-14 17:18:48)


Joshu asked, “Have you eaten your rice porridge? The monk replied, “I have eaten.”
Joshu said, “Then you had better wash your bowl.”  At that moment the monk was enlightened.
"Consciousness is the ground of all being." - Dr. Amit Goswami
Registered Linux User #535772

Offline

#6 2011-06-14 17:27:20

Wash Your Bowl
Member
Registered: 2011-05-21
Posts: 8

Re: [SOLVED] ATI Radeon X1270 - xf86-video-ati - Screen Distortion

I researched how to use Dmesg so I thought I'd post just for memory and dma.  I don't know if these are helpful in the least bit but I hate feeling useless. 

dmesg | -i memory

dmesg | grep -i dma

That's odd... This is line 9 in grep -i dma

ahci 0000:00:12.0: controller can't do 64bit DMA, forcing 32bit

is this causing a problem?

Last edited by Wash Your Bowl (2011-06-14 18:18:36)


Joshu asked, “Have you eaten your rice porridge? The monk replied, “I have eaten.”
Joshu said, “Then you had better wash your bowl.”  At that moment the monk was enlightened.
"Consciousness is the ground of all being." - Dr. Amit Goswami
Registered Linux User #535772

Offline

#7 2011-06-14 18:17:14

Wash Your Bowl
Member
Registered: 2011-05-21
Posts: 8

Re: [SOLVED] ATI Radeon X1270 - xf86-video-ati - Screen Distortion

Sorry if this has nothing to do with the problem but once again looking through these outputs I spotted what I thought might be a problem. 

First this is line 416 of /var/log/xorg.0.log

416 [    29.901] (II) RADEON(0): VRAM usage limit set to 346060K

If I'm reading this right the max VRAM xorg will use is ~338M

Ok now this is from dmesg | grep -i memory

15.     [TTM] Zone  kernel: Available graphics memory: 898352 kiB.
16.     [drm] radeon: 384M of VRAM memory ready
17.     [drm] radeon: 512M of GTT memory ready.

So I have 384M of total VRAM and xorg can use 338M of VRAM.  Again this analysis could be incredibly wrong; everything I know about graphic cards I learned in the last half hour but here goes nothing.

Ok so something I forgot to mention before is that the distortion normally starts when I scroll quickly.  I played around a little bit and found the distortion doesn't start when I scroll terminal or leafpad quickly; only when I scroll down a webpage in chromium.  I have no other programs to really test with but maybe I'll install a couple more and let you know if you think it's relevant.  I only have 46M of VRAM above the xorg limit and when I scroll quickly chromium uses more than this 46M leaving xorg with too little to function properly. So this would make sense with what you said before about my card not allocating memory correctly.  I feel like there should be more memory than what my computer is telling me is available. 

Does this make any sense?
I have no idea how to test this; is there a program or a command I can use to measure VRAM usage?  I google it but couldn't find anything.

Last edited by Wash Your Bowl (2011-06-14 18:27:19)


Joshu asked, “Have you eaten your rice porridge? The monk replied, “I have eaten.”
Joshu said, “Then you had better wash your bowl.”  At that moment the monk was enlightened.
"Consciousness is the ground of all being." - Dr. Amit Goswami
Registered Linux User #535772

Offline

#8 2011-06-14 18:55:20

ewaller
Administrator
From: Pasadena, CA
Registered: 2009-07-13
Posts: 19,739

Re: [SOLVED] ATI Radeon X1270 - xf86-video-ati - Screen Distortion

It does, and I looked briefly at your logs after you had posted them.  Right now, I am at $DAYJOB where I take quick peeks at the Arch Forums while the FPGA router runs -- I'll take a closer look when I get home tonight.


Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature -- Michael Faraday
Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine. -- Alan Turing
---
How to Ask Questions the Smart Way

Offline

#9 2011-06-14 19:43:36

Wash Your Bowl
Member
Registered: 2011-05-21
Posts: 8

Re: [SOLVED] ATI Radeon X1270 - xf86-video-ati - Screen Distortion

Thanks a lot.  No rush, I've put up with this for 6-7 months now and I'm just happy to finally know what is probably causing the problem.


Joshu asked, “Have you eaten your rice porridge? The monk replied, “I have eaten.”
Joshu said, “Then you had better wash your bowl.”  At that moment the monk was enlightened.
"Consciousness is the ground of all being." - Dr. Amit Goswami
Registered Linux User #535772

Offline

#10 2011-06-15 05:06:40

ewaller
Administrator
From: Pasadena, CA
Registered: 2009-07-13
Posts: 19,739

Re: [SOLVED] ATI Radeon X1270 - xf86-video-ati - Screen Distortion

Well, it does seem a little strange, but I cannot definitely say there is or is not an issue.  I don't have a Radeon system so I cannot really experiment.  From what I read of the ATI driver for Xorg, it is merely a wrapper that will, in your case, invoke the Radeon Xorg driver.

I did look through the man page for Radeon, and it has just a few options wink
I would experiment with some of the options in my Xorg conf and see if they have any impact.  For starters, try playing with:

Option "NoAccel" 
Option "AGPMode"
Option "EXAPixmaps" 
Option "AccelMethod"
Option "RenderAccel"

Those were the once that looked interesting to me


Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature -- Michael Faraday
Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine. -- Alan Turing
---
How to Ask Questions the Smart Way

Offline

#11 2011-06-15 17:35:25

ConnorBehan
Package Maintainer (PM)
From: Long Island NY
Registered: 2007-07-05
Posts: 1,359
Website

Re: [SOLVED] ATI Radeon X1270 - xf86-video-ati - Screen Distortion

Interesting. This problem has happened to me too with a Radeon card but I don't think my case is quite as severe... the text goes back to normal if I wait for a long enough time. I agree that this is related to the driver but I'm not sure if it's the DDX (xf86-video-ati) or the radeon GPU kernel module. One other option that a lot of people find interesting is "EnablePageFlip".


6EA3 F3F3 B908 2632 A9CB E931 D53A 0445 B47A 0DAB
Great things come in tar.xz packages.

Offline

#12 2011-06-17 17:12:43

Wash Your Bowl
Member
Registered: 2011-05-21
Posts: 8

Re: [SOLVED] ATI Radeon X1270 - xf86-video-ati - Screen Distortion

Thanks a lot guys.  I haven't been using my computer much the past couple days so I haven't had a chance to really test anything out.  Like three days ago I updated my packages and, oddly, I haven't had a single graphics problem since.  I don't know what updated but my graphics configuration is definitely different.  I'm not sure if the problem actually went away or if I just haven't done anything to really piss off my computer yet. 
I'll take a look into those options; my knowledge of xorg and graphics card configuration is so little I didn't even know those existed.  Thanks a lot for your help.  I learned a lot about trouble shooting graphics cards in the process.  I'll know how to troubleshoot my card next time I have problems.
I'm gonna mark this thread as solved because even if I do continue to have problems I'll be able to work on them myself.


Joshu asked, “Have you eaten your rice porridge? The monk replied, “I have eaten.”
Joshu said, “Then you had better wash your bowl.”  At that moment the monk was enlightened.
"Consciousness is the ground of all being." - Dr. Amit Goswami
Registered Linux User #535772

Offline

Board footer

Powered by FluxBB