RadeonHD: AtomBIOS code faults?

[jokhva]

On a Asus M2A-VM motherboard shipped with a RS690 IGP display card, and a second display card plugged into the PCIE slot, the radeonhd's AtomBIOS code (as well as that of xf86-video-ati) failed to detect the video bios of the RS690 IPG display card.

This happens nearly through all the versions of radeonhd, and then the recent versions of xf86-video-ati(Version 6.8.0 can detect correctly, but the latest git snapshot won't).

[bridgman]

I don't think either driver fully handles all possible multi-GPU configurations today, although Alex can probably give more info. The issue you're seeing here, I think, is primary vs secondary display, since the two get handled differently at startup.

Is the other display card AtomBIOS-based, and is it set as primary (ie do your boot messages appear on it) ? The changes made recently to radeon were related to how the secondary adapter is initialized; there were a few different approaches tried over the last week or so.

[agd5f]

It can be tricky getting access to the bios on secondary cards (especially IGP chips since the rom is usually shared with the system rom). I'd really need to see your xorg log to debug further. As John noted, it probably makes sense to try setting which card is considered primary in the bios (or enabling the surroundview option if there is one).

[jokhva]

I don't think either driver fully handles all possible multi-GPU configurations today, although Alex can probably give more info. The issue you're seeing here, I think, is primary vs secondary display, since the two get handled differently at startup.

It might be the reason.

Is the other display card AtomBIOS-based, and is it set as primary (ie do your boot messages appear on it) ? The changes made recently to radeon were related to how the secondary adapter is initialized; there were a few different approaches tried over the last week or so.

No, it is a Nvidia 7300GT. My BIOS doesn't have an option for secondary display. It can only choose one card for display.

[jokhva]

It can be tricky getting access to the bios on secondary cards (especially IGP chips since the rom is usually shared with the system rom). I'd really need to see your xorg log to debug further. As John noted, it probably makes sense to try setting which card is considered primary in the bios (or enabling the surroundview option if there is one).

I don't have one now.
The typical error message is that it can find a Radeon card, but AtomBIOS detection failed saying the video bios can't be fetched from PCI space. Actually by fetching from ISA space, the detection would be success. Once I tried to hack the AtomBIOS code to enable ISA space detection, It succeeded, as the old ATI/radeon code does.

However, the AtomBIOS code is rather complicated and beyond my coding ability to go further...