[CentOS] Re: Monitor power save question

Mon Feb 4 16:04:31 UTC 2008
David G. Miller <dave at davenjudy.org>

I wrote and now I'm answering my own post:
> nate" <centos at linuxpowered.net> wrote:
>> > David G. Miller wrote:
>> >
>> >   
>>     
>>>> >> >
>>>> >> > Section "Device"
>>>> >> >         Identifier  "Videocard0"
>>>> >> >         Driver      "vesa"
>>>> >> > EndSection
>>>>         
>>> >>     
>>>       
>> >
>> > [..]
>> >
>> >   
>>     
>>>> >> > and the video card is (this is a single card that shows up twice in lspci):
>>>> >> >
>>>> >> > 04:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV516 [Radeon
>>>> >> > X1300/X1550 Series] (prog-if 00 [VGA])
>>>>         
>>> >>     
>>>       
>> >
>> > any particular reason why your using the vesa driver on what seems to
>> > be a fairly recent ATI card instead of the ATI specific drivers? Perhaps
>> > the vesa driver doesn't work as well with power management(never used it
>> > myself for very long).
>> >
>> > I'd try the ATI drivers and see if it fixes the behavior, you'll probably
>> > get much better performance at the same time, with perhaps a bit less
>> > stability depending on what you do.
>> >
>> > nate
>>     
> It's what the install configurator came up with and the ati driver 
> doesn't work with this video card (output from startx):
>
> ...
> (WW) RADEON: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:4:0:1) found
> (WW) R128: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:4:0:1) found
> (EE) No devices detected.
>
> Fatal server error:
> no screens found
> XIO:  fatal IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on X server ":0.0"
>       after 0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events remaining.
>
> I like getting a new install stable and fully functional with open 
> source drivers before introducing perturbations like using a proprietary 
> display driver.  That being said, I just installed the ATI proprietary 
> driver.  So far the system is stable.  I'll see whether the monitor 
> correctly goes to a low power mode tonight.
The ATI proprietary driver seems to have fixed the problem.  The monitor 
was in power save mode when I checked it this morning. 

The ATI Linux Driver wiki at 
http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux is very badly 
out of date.  It has lots of dire warnings about things not working, 
work arounds required, etc.  I pulled down the driver package from the 
ATI site, ran it to create a Red Hat rpm and installed the RPM.  After I 
rebooted, everything just worked.  I added some comments to the wiki to 
indicate that the problems described there only apply to RHEL/CentOS 
5.0.  Upgrading a 5.0 install to 5.1 or installing from 5.1 images and 
then installing the ATI proprietary driver is a piece of cake.

It would be nice if the open source "ati" display driver got extended to 
include more recent ATI video cards.  I'm now running a "tainted" kernel 
since I have the proprietary fglrx kernel module.  Unfortunately, as 
with how this thread got started, lots of functionality isn't there with 
the "vesa" display driver.

Cheers,
Dave

-- 
Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
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