X Not Launching & Fix No Longer Works

[Louis Epstein]

I posted a couple of months ago when I still had a workaround.

My startx file was generating some error messages on attempts
to launch X,with MESA-LOADER: reporting

failed to open radeon: Cannot open "usr/local/lib/dri/radeon_dri.so" (search paths /usr/local/lib/dri, suffix _dri)
failed to load driver: radeon

amid more general

failed to retrieve device information

messages.
This is interspersed with

kmsro: driver missing

and led to

Fatal server error:
(EE) AddScreen/ScreenInit failed for gpu driver 0 -1



copying a radeon_dri.so into /usr/local/lib/dri (which does have a radeonsi_dri.so in it)

would change the "Cannot open..." message into another "failed to retrieve device information"
followed by

unknown chip id 0x683d, can't guess.

(The same fatal server error would ensue).

Until now I could get things working again by deleting and reinstalling xorg and xorg-server
but now apparently the older version of xorg-server (21.1.7 something) no longer gets installed
by pkg install and the new version 21.1.8_2 is the only one available and is not compatible.

A lot of amdgpu firmware packages just got updated though I assume only the one for my card
would be called on.

-=-=-
The World Trade Center towers MUST rise again,
at least as tall as before...or terror has triumphed.

[Louis Epstein]

(Not only my startx file that launches fvwm fails to launch...trying
xinit openttd
to launch the game fails with the same error messages on unknown chip).

[Alastair Hogge]

My gosh, on an initial glance, it looks like you have mismatched base and
Ports, or there some pkg's are out of sync between X, the graphics stack,
and your base.

--
To health and anarchy

[Louis Epstein]

I am ordinarily upgrading by way of pulling ports from git,
doing a synth prepare-system,
and a pkg upgrade -r Synth.

I am running 12.4-RELEASE-p4.

pixman is 0.42.2

Any suggestions?

[Alastair Hogge]

12.4 is probably your problem.

> pixman is 0.42.2
>
> Any suggestions?

Switch to 13 or 14 if you can, maintaining packages on 12.4 while trying
to drive a AMD Radeon GPU sounds like a world of pain, graphics/drm-510-
kmod is only compatible with FreeBSD => 13.1, and the for time being, the
latest GPU kernel drivers are in Ports.

[Louis Epstein]

The xorg-server version seems to be what broke things.
I tend to be trailing-edge on my version of the OS...each new version
seems to stop supporting something.

I note that on bootup there's a message saying how drm-kmod
is needed but it was installed last September per pkg info.

[Louis Epstein]

21.1.8_4 has since emerged and doesn't work either.

> I tend to be trailing-edge on my version of the OS...each new version
> seems to stop supporting something.

(No idea if 13.x would be harder on Seamonkey?)

[Louis Epstein]

13.2 and Seamonkey and X are now working today,finally.