Dual P690 with three Screens

[tomcat]

Hi !

I am trying to run two P690 in the same machine:
Card 1: PCIe x16 with 2x DVI
Card 2: PCIe x1 with 1x DVI
Platform: Ubuntu 9.04-64 with mtxdriver-installer-x86-64-cvs-20090511 (1.4.7) and mtx kernel module installed.
(On startup the screens show a dark blue background)

The PCIeX16 with two screens is working fine.
The PCIeX1 with one screen is working fine
I can get a combo of both cards with one screen each to work,
it just won't do with both cards and three screens.

I have added vmalloc=512m to the grub boot loader and I have put "regSysMmFlags=0" in /etc/modules.

Warnings and messages in Xorg.0.log:
- More than one possible primary device found
- Screen (0.1.2) shcares mem & io resources
- MTX(2.1.0): Parhelia device stopped
-> System boots, but screens go black after some rounds of testing.

Desired layout is 3 Screens with Xinerama.

I have attached the Xorg.0.log and my xorg.conf - and would appreciate any hints.

Many thanks!
Tom.

Xorg.0.log

Xorg.0.log 3 screens 2 cards

(62.07 KiB) Downloaded 373 times

[tomcat]

OK, solved by using a workaround.

- Two cards do work,
BUT:
- GDM (or XDM) do not seem to like to start the X-Server when two cards are configured.
-> we disabled GDM/XDM
- now I am starting X from the commandline with "startx &" and everything is fine.
(We had to add my user to the audio-group, otherwise sound was not working, but that's about it.)

We were not able to find out, why GDM or XDM were not able to start the X-Server.
My current best guess is related to timeout issues as it takes X a while to initialize the two cards and three screens, but this ist just a wild guess.
With XDM we had intermittend successes - sometimes it would, sometimes it would not work. But it never worked after reboot of the machine, only when started manually. Strange....

See attached xorg.conf for the working configuration.

Thanks,
Tom.

[tomcat]

My hunch regarding timeout kept on bothering me...
(Everything here worked on Ubuntu 9.04.)

1. I ran:

Code: Select all

sudo dpgk-reconfigure gdm

to get GDM back into the autostartup.

2. Then modified in file /etc/gdm/gdm.conf
change "GdmXserverTimeout=10" to
GdmXserverTimeout=40
which now gives the X-Server 40 Seconds to start up. It doesn't take that long, but 10 seconds was not enough.

Now GDM is starting properly - and is able to start X as well.
Problem solved, happy Matrox User

(My guess is that the intermittend successes we had came from some stuff being cached in memory and so the startup was barely able to run in 10 seconds....)

Tom.