Hardfreeze with ATi 3.2.8 drivers

[Jammet]

I've been using Gentoo since last December, and this is my first post to the forum. So, nice hello to everybody, first. =)

However, I've got this problem: I've managed to get those ati-drivers to cooperate with the Xfree, and also with K7S8X Mainboard (AsRock) that I've got. For example, in order to be able to see OpenGL graphics, I had to lower AGP to 4x.

At this point, months went by and I've failed to fix the problem that when I run OpenGL based apps and games, after a random amount of minutes (5-15), the computer will freeze, and no input or output is possible anymore. Since I do not have another computer here, I can not test if the network is still reachable, but I believe that it is not.

Now, what can cause these freezes? Some Bios setting? They all look sane to me. The driver setup was a big hassle with this mainboard, but with acclerated 2D graphics (using OpenGL) the system does not freeze.

So my belief is, that this has (again) something to do with some sort of memory corruption. Is that possible?

I've read that the current 3.7.0 drivers are (still) masked out for a memory leak bug. I wonder, when is there a fix available for this? I haven't yet tried those because of them being masked out. And I'm quite helpess at the freezing problem. It's just no fun playing a game when you know it's going to end in 10 minutes, roughly.

I wish I could describe the problem but I have no way of debugging it. It just freezes.

Jammet

[whatzdaname]

Why not try installing ATI driver 3.7.0 ??
Even if it's masked at the moment, you can comment it out from

/usr/portage/profiles/package.mask

and do

emerge ati-driver-3.7.0

I'm using Radeon 9200 (128MB) + Asus P4P800 and no problem here.

[Jammet]

I've just tried. Something must have gone wrong there, because after emerging the newer version, before and after re-running 'opengl-update ati', the only rendering I saw was Software based Opengl. Very slow.

Is there anything one needs to do besides emerging the new version and running opengl-update? Rerun the XF86 Config tool as well?

Jammet