FC1 x86_64 - UPDATE

[Rick Stevens]

Rick Stevens wrote:
> Just a note to let you know that I put FC1 for AMD64 up on a box of
> mine this weekend.  Works fine, except for the video card I put in the
> stupid thing (bought an ATI Radeon 9600SE and didn't notice the "SE" on
> the box!  DOH!)  The card shows up under two PCI IDs: 1002:4151 and
> 1002:4171 and is identified as a Radeon 9600 AQ with a 350RV chipset.
> 
> If you should decide to get one of these cards, be forewarned that the
> card is NOT supported under XFree86 4.3.0's "radeon" driver (Fedora and
> RH8.0/RH9).  For 32-bit environments, ATI does have a pretty good driver
> on their website, so download and install it.  For full functionality,
> you will need the kernel source RPM installed and (I think) configured
> (through the "make dep" stage), but you do NOT need to build a kernel
> for it.
> 
> This will NOT work for the AMD64 version.  ATI supplies part of the
> driver kit as a static library that has been linked for a 32-bit
> environment only.  I haven't had time to see if I can come up with
> options to use to convince the compiler and linker to deal with this
> situation (e.g. build a 32-bit driver on the 64-bit system).
> 
> Note that this card IS supported by the XFree86 4.4.0 "radeon" driver
> (only provides accelerated 2D operation).  Building XFree86 is not a
> trivial task (I did it this weekend--just to see how good it is).
> 
> This is just a heads-up, people.  Thought you'd like to know before
> you get whonked by this little gotcha.

UPDATE: There is no way to force XFree 4.3.0's "radeon" driver to handle
the card.  On my ASUS mobo, the 9600SE shows up as PCI bus IDs 1:0.0
and 1:0.1.  No amount of fiddling with the "BusID" options in XF86Config
will get the card to work.  If you set up "Device" entries for both
BusIDs, the result is "No Device section for PCI ID 1:0:1".  If you
comment out the section for 1:0:0, you get "No Device found".  The
"ChipID" options result in "Not valid for this driver" errors.  Grrrr!

As I said, XFree86 4.4.0 worked pretty well and the radeon driver
handles the card with no problem.  There were some strange things with a
couple of desktop applets (gkrellkm took way too much CPU for example
and I'm not sure what's causing that--just could be a 32-bit app
hitting a 64-bit machine).

Building 4.4.0 results in just 64-bit libraries being built and I
haven't sorted out how to get it to build 32-bit libraries as well.  As
a result, some things such as Mozilla (which is shipped as a 32-bit app)
will not run as it can't find a 32-bit version of libX11m.so.

To get around this,  I downloaded the source for Mozilla 1.6 and tried
to build it as a 64-bit app, but the build will not work as the source
does not recognize any of the compiler predefines for the AMD64
architecture and quits in a huff.  Tweaking that will take time (I'm not
a Mozilla developer, so I have to analyze just how it's built and deal
with each oopsie individually) and I don't know how much time I can
devote to it right now (my daytime job has kept me hopping).

DANG!  This is starting to read like a BLOG entry, isn't it?  ;-)
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> - Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
> - VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
> -                                                                    -
> -   Errors have occurred. We won't tell you where or why.  We have   -
> -                         lazy programmers.                          -
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
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-- 
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-  You know you've landed gear-up when it takes full power to taxi.  -
-                                                -- Chuck Yeager     -
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