Mageia 1 - Gotchas

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

While installation succeeded, 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

While Mageia repositories provide virtualbox package, it does not keep pace with the latest version available on official site. openSUSE 11.4 package seems to be able to cope with Mageia's environment (Mandriva versions require older bits - Python 2.6, openssl 0.9.8).