Acer Aspire AS5672 - Xorg crashes with radeonhd driver - how to fix?

[Torfinn Ingolfsen]

Hi,

I'm doing more testing on this old laptop: Acer Aspire AS5672[1].
The machine has a ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 gfx chip / card:
root at kg-home# pciconf -lv | grep -A4 vga
vgapci0 at pci0:1:0:0:    class=0x030000 card=0x00941025 chip=0x71c51002 rev=0x00 hdr=0x00
    vendor     = 'ATI Technologies Inc. / Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.'
    device     = 'ATI MOBILITY /ATI RADEON X1600 (M56)'
    class      = display
    subclass   = VGA

And 'Xorg -configure' selects the radeonhd driver. Unfortunately, trying to start Xorg with this driver makes Xorg crash.
>From /var/log/messages:
Jul 18 20:03:40 kg-home kernel: drm0: <ATI Mobility Radeon X1600> on vgapci0
Jul 18 20:03:40 kg-home kernel: info: [drm] MSI enabled 1 message(s)
Jul 18 20:03:40 kg-home kernel: info: [drm] Initialized radeon 1.31.0 20080613
Jul 18 20:03:40 kg-home kernel: info: [drm] Setting GART location based on new memory map
Jul 18 20:03:40 kg-home kernel: info: [drm] Loading R500 Microcode
Jul 18 20:03:40 kg-home kernel: info: [drm] Num pipes: 1
Jul 18 20:03:40 kg-home kernel: info: [drm] writeback test succeeded in 1 usecs
Jul 18 20:03:40 kg-home kernel: drm0: [ITHREAD]
Jul 18 20:03:40 kg-home kernel: pid 5408 (Xorg), uid 0: exited on signal 11 (core dumped)
Jul 18 20:03:40 kg-home kernel: info: [drm] Num pipes: 1

How do I make the radeonhd driver work?
More details (xorg.conf file, Xorg.0.log files) on the FreeBSD page[2] for this machine.

FWIW, if I use the radeon driver, Xorg works:
Jul 18 21:25:44 kg-home kernel: drm0: <ATI Mobility Radeon X1600> on vgapci0
Jul 18 21:25:44 kg-home kernel: info: [drm] MSI enabled 1 message(s)
Jul 18 21:25:44 kg-home kernel: info: [drm] Initialized radeon 1.31.0 20080613
Jul 18 21:25:45 kg-home kernel: info: [drm] Setting GART location based on new memory map
Jul 18 21:25:45 kg-home kernel: info: [drm] Loading R500 Microcode
Jul 18 21:25:45 kg-home kernel: info: [drm] Num pipes: 1
Jul 18 21:25:45 kg-home kernel: info: [drm] writeback test succeeded in 1 usecs
Jul 18 21:25:45 kg-home kernel: drm0: [ITHREAD]

The machine is running FreeBSD 8.2-stable:
tingo at kg-home$ uname -a
FreeBSD kg-home.kg4.no 8.2-STABLE FreeBSD 8.2-STABLE #0: Sun Jul 17 12:28:11 CEST 2011     root at kg-home.kg4.no:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/AS5672  i386

and all ports are updated.

References:
1) http://sites.google.com/site/tingox/as5672
2) http://sites.google.com/site/tingox/aceraspireas5672andfreebsd
-- 
Torfinn