Mageia 1 - Gotchas

“Mageia is a fork of Mandriva Linux, supported by a not-for-profit organisation of recognized and elected contributors.”

While installation went just fine, kernel panicked on the first boot on my workstation equipped with Biostar TA790GX A3+ motherboard containing on-board Radeon HD3300 graphic card:

Oct  9 12:53:24 tio-linux kernel: fa00cc76c>] ? radeon_gem_object_create+0x8c/0x120 [radeon]
Oct  9 12:53:24 tio-linux kernel: [<ffffffffa00ccbb8>] ? radeon_gem_create_ioctl+0x58/0xd0 [radeon]
Oct  9 12:53:24 tio-linux kernel: [<ffffffff8107cfb0>] ? lock_hrtimer_base.clone.25+0x30/0x60
Oct  9 12:53:24 tio-linux kernel: [<ffffffffa00212b4>] ? drm_ioctl+0x3e4/0x4c0 [drm]
Oct  9 12:53:24 tio-linux kernel: [<ffffffffa00ccb60>] ? radeon_gem_create_ioctl+0x0/0xd0 [radeon]
Oct  9 12:53:24 tio-linux kernel: [<ffffffff811ea6ba>] ? tomoyo_init_request_info+0x3a/0x70
Oct  9 12:53:24 tio-linux kernel: [<ffffffff8115ab89>] ? do_vfs_ioctl+0x99/0x570
Oct  9 12:53:24 tio-linux kernel: [<ffffffff8115b0f1>] ? sys_ioctl+0x91/0xa0
Oct  9 12:53:24 tio-linux kernel: [<ffffffff81002e92>] ? system_call_fastpath+0x16/0x1b
Oct  9 12:53:24 tio-linux kernel: ---[ end trace a582e0de5c4c8dd9 ]---
Oct  9 12:53:24 tio-linux kernel: [drm:radeon_ttm_backend_bind] *ERROR* failed to bind 1280 pages at 0x00000000
Oct  9 12:53:24 tio-linux kernel: radeon 0000:01:05.0: object_init failed for (5242880, 0x00000002)
Oct  9 12:53:24 tio-linux kernel: [drm:radeon_gem_object_create] *ERROR* Failed to allocate GEM object (5242880, 2, 4096, -22)
Oct  9 12:53:24 tio-linux kernel: ------------[ cut here ]------------
Oct  9 12:53:24 tio-linux kernel: WARNING: at drivers/gpu/drm/radeon/radeon_gart.c:176 radeon_gart_bind+0x1ab/0x1c0 [radeon]()
Oct  9 12:53:24 tio-linux kernel: Hardware name: TA790GX A3+
Oct  9 12:53:24 tio-linux kernel: trying to bind memory to unitialized GART !

It turned out it's a known issue (Radeon firmware missing in initrd).

• Boot with Radeon KMS temporarily disabled - add following parameter to kernel line in GRUB:

radeon.modeset=0 

• install radeon-firmware package

$ sudo urpmi radeon-firmware

• recreate the initrd with Radeon firmware added

$ sudo bootloader-config --action rebuild-initrds

• reboot

Mageia package repository provides virtualbox package, but it does not keep pace with the latest version available on official site. Mandriva packages are pre-built against older bits (Python 2.6, openssl 0.9.8), but openSUSE 11.4 package seems to fit in Mageia's environment (Python 2.7, openssl 1.0.0).