xorg hangs, mouse still usable. Radeon x1400 mobility

[Henry Gomersall]

Binary package hint: xserver-xorg-video-ati

Xorg hangs with no update to the screen. The mouse cursor still moves, but does not interact with anything.

The laptop is running Compiz.

[Henry Gomersall (hgomersall)]

Turning off Compiz results in no hangs.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Does setting Option "AccelMethod" "EXA" in xorg.conf make the issue go away when running with Compiz enabled?

[Thom Pischke (thom-pischke)]

Same thing here with intel x3100. Alt-Tab pretty consistenly hangs everything but mouse cursor if compiz enabled. Can't even restart X. Hard shutdown necessary. Sucks.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Could either of you please try with EXA, as mentioned in #6?

[Henry Gomersall (hgomersall)]

I get a warning in /var/log/Xorg.0.log and no ability to turn on Compiz with EXA enabled (so the original bug cannot be realised). I get a warning telling me Compiz cannot be enabled.

(WW) RADEON(0): Direct rendering disabled
(II) RADEON(0): EXA Composite requires CP on R5xx/IGP
(II) RADEON(0): Setting EXA maxPitchBytes
(II) RADEON(0): num quad-pipes is 1
(II) EXA(0): Offscreen pixmap area of 121896960 bytes
(II) EXA(0): Driver registered support for the following operations:
(II) Solid
(II) Copy
(II) UploadToScreen
(II) DownloadFromScreen
(II) RADEON(0): Acceleration enabled

[Henry Gomersall (hgomersall)]

I've just realised I can no longer load Compiz with XAA enabled. I have no idea what the problem is now. This is the only warning in Xorg.0.log

(WW) RADEON(0): Direct rendering disabled
(II) RADEON(0): XAA Render acceleration unsupported on Radeon 9500/9700 and newer. Please use EXA instead.
(II) RADEON(0): Render acceleration disabled

[Henry Gomersall (hgomersall)]

It seems I'm also loading the fglrx driver into the kernel. I've no idea why this still resides on my computer - I removed all the fglrx packages.

This is inferred from the kernel tainting warning in dmesg.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Ahh, that would explain it. Yes, you should completely remove all fglrx driver components and dependencies, and possibly reinstall mesa and the -ati driver. If you can still reproduce the issue once your system is cleaned, please do reopen this bug and we can investigate further.