mere presence of fglrx on system prevents OS drivers from working

[Aaron Bentley]

I had been using the fglrx driver on Intrepid. After upgrading to Jaunty, video was completely broken on my "02:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: ATI Technologies Inc Mobility Radeon HD 3600 Series [1002:9598]. It showed abstract art instead of the login screen. The open source drivers (radeon, radeonhd, vesa) appeared equally broken. But then, I did "apt-get-remove --purge xserver-driver-fglrx", and they started working.

 Video playback was still unaccelerated, because the drm module wasn't being loaded. Manual attempts produced "FATAL: Error inserting drm (/lib/modules/2.6.28-11-generic/kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/drm.ko): Cannot allocate memory". Playing a hunch, I did "apt-get remove --purge fglrx-kernel-source; apt-get remove --purge fglrx-modaliases; reboot". This allowed the drm module to load, and my world is now happy.

So there is a solution, but this bug is about the fact that it's not at all obvious when fglrx is being greedy and ruining it for others. I understand that there are more moving parts than just the video driver, but having one driver installed should not prevent you from using a different one.

[Aaron Bentley (abentley)]

This bug is about the Radeon 3600 Series, which I believe is R600 based, so the solution to 295994 does not apply here.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

I've posted a new version of the -fglrx driver to our xorg-edgers PPA,
would you mind testing it either on Jaunty or Karmic and see if it
resolves this bug?

Get fglrx 8.620 here:

  https://edge.launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa

[Aaron Bentley (abentley)]

2:8.620-0ubuntu1~jaunty does not resolve this bug for me.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Thanks for testing