ASUS A7V8X-X and Radeon 9200SE/TD 128 with SuSE 8.2

rev. date: 26-Jun-2005

rev. by: Fred Morris

Background

I had tried about a year ago to get this working, and I was more or less successful: I got it working well enough with the ATI fglrx-4.3.0-3.7.6 driver after hacking on it for a while (modifying their agpgart_be.c) that it was usable with desktop apps. I didn't do any more with it, and I didn't hear from ASUS.

This motherboard uses a VIA KT400 Northbridge which is AGP 3 only, and therein lies the rub... I think.

However, I just loaded the ATI fglrx-4.3.0-8-14.13 driver, and that seems to work pretty well out of the box.

Kernel Hacking (pointless)

Since I was compiling a kernel anyway, I thought I'd try and backfit the Linux 2.4.31 AGP driver (drivers/char/agp/) to the (SuSE patched)  2.4.20 kernel and see if that would make it go. I was able to get it to compile by additionally replacing pci_ids.h and agp_backend.h in include/linux/. However it wouldn't see the aperture settings for the card in agpgart_be.c:via_fetch_size() and I don't know if this is because the number is just weird or because the VIA_APSIZE offset is wrong. I tricked it, but that didn't allow XFree86 to automagically pick it up with the Radeon driver, so I lost interest.

I suggest that if you don't want to use the proprietary ATI driver that you look at the AGP3 support in a  2.6 kernel. I suspect there is some major magic in this regard, since even with the earlier  ATI driver I ran into problems with this.

Using the Proprietary ATI Driver with More Than One Kernel

As mentioned I was building my own kernel, and as a consequence of that I do have something additional to offer in case you may happen to be doing the same thing.

Problem: Installing the driver under one kernel disables it under the others

You will notice after running ati-driver-installer-8.14.13.run that the driver no longer loads under the previous kernel! I noted two dependencies which needed to be dealt with.

The following is provided purely on a use at your own risk basis. (By the way, you do have separate /lib/modules and /usr/src trees, don't you?)

/lib/modules/fglrx/fglrx.o

/lib/modules/fglrx/fglrx.o is a symlink to /lib/modules/fglrx/fglrx.`uname -r`.o

When you install under the new kernel, the previous kernel-dependent module is deleted. Save this file, and put it back in this directory (along with the installation logfile, it may come in handy) after doing the install under the new kernel. You'll need some way to switch the symlink back and forth, and I modified /etc/rc.d/xdm to do that.

/lib/modules/(kernel)/kernel/drivers/char/drm/fglrx.o

This file turns out to be identical to the kernel-specific file you just saved off and restored in the previous step, and you can replace it with a symlink to the appropriate kernel-specific module in /lib/modules/fglrx/.