My latest on fglrx (ATI/AMD) drivers and xorg

Okay! After much futzing about tracking down old kernel modules that didn't uninstall properly, I got the latest (8.35.5) ATI drivers working. First thing I noticed was a hugemongiuous memory leak forcing me to bail at <1FPS after 2-4 min. I seem to have fixed that in the xorg.conf and played around testing some other settings I had disabled before too, so I have an xorg.conf I am reasonably happy with again. Here are the relevant parts:

Section "Module"
Load "GLcore"
Load "dbe"
SubSection "extmod"
Option "omit xfree86-dga" # don't initialise the DGA extension
EndSubSection
Load "extmod"
Load "record"
Load "bitmap"
Load "ddc"
Load "dri"
Load "freetype"
Load "glx"
Load "int10"
Load "type1"
Load "vbe"
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Disable" # some place on the 'net said to diable this
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "ATI X1300"
Driver "fglrx"
Option "no_accel" "FALSE"
Option "no_dri" "FALSE"
Option "mtrr" "OFF" # disable DRI mtrr mapper, driver has its own code for mtrr
Option "BusType" "AGP" # force AGP bus (probably not needed due to autodetect)
Option "AGPMask" "0x00000003" # force disable 1x and 2x AGP modes
Option "AGPv3Mask" "0x00000001" # force disable 4x mode (use 8x)
Option "VideoOverlay" "OFF" # must be off for OpenGLOverlay to be on
Option "OpenGLOverlay" "ON" # passing the video render thru openGL seems to work fine
Option "DefaultVisualTrueColor" "TRUE"
Option "PseudoColorVisuals" "ON"
Option "FSAAEnable" "FALSE" # may cause serious SL problems when TRUE
# (namely, mouseclicks fail randomly in-world)
# Option "FSAAScale" "4"
# Option "FSAADisableGamma" "FALSE"
# Option "FSAACustomizeMSPos" "FALSE"
Option "UseFastTLS" "0"
Option "BlockSignalsOnLock" "TRUE"
Option "UseInternalAGPGART" "FALSE" # stability issues when TRUE
Option "ForceGenericCPU" "FALSE"
Option "KernelModuleParm" "agplock=0" # AGP locked user pages: disabled
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection

I still seem to be getting the slow leak reported by many others. And the usual "Login Packets dropped in the Pacific Ocean" sim-login freezes (that is why you get so many user-kill crash reports from this side of the pond, Tofu ;-P ) But now the 1.4 series is not only usable but a significantly better experience for me.

Hope this xorg.conf is of use to some.

The above settings were causing XINE to be very badly behaved when playing movies and also using GOOM with music files (ie, it crashed). Manually telling XINE to render video via openGL (rather than 'auto') fixed this. (Remmeber I have videoOverlay off and OpenGLOverlay on in my setup).