December 1st, 2003

I finally got X working on my PowerBook!

After reviewing Linux kernel and XFree86 code for weeks, hacking the hell out of radeon_base.c adding random debugging everywhere, searching mailing lists for clues, and lots of guessing, I finally did the make && startx that resulted in a clean display coming up.

I started pulling out each change to isolate what caused it, and this was it:

-    save->crtc_offset_cntl = INREG(RADEON_CRTC_OFFSET_CNTL);
+    save->crtc_offset_cntl = 0;

Anyway, I tossed in a few more changes to get rid of some weird drawing problems that came up when moving windows around and submitted the diff back to the XFree86 group in the bug report.

Hopefully some of it will get committed before XFree86 4.4.0 is released so support for the new 15" PowerBooks is there. Then matthieu@ will commit 4.4.0 to our xf4 tree and I can go back to running the OpenBSD version of X.

Questions or comments?
Please feel free to contact me.