xorg-7.0 freezes on gentoo ppc64 linux with 9800 card

[Brian D. Carlstrom]

Yang Dehua writes:
 > I just bought a mac 9800xt card to replace my 9600pro on my G5
 > running gentoo ppc64 linux(2006.0, 64-bit userland). The system
 > worked fine until I started xorg-7.0: the screen blacked and the
 > keyboard and mouse were not responding any more, so I had to shutdown
 > the machine. The same X config worked well with 9600pro card(64M).

I ran into this and posted a workaround about it here for fedora:
    http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/fedora-ppc/2006-March/000816.html

I based this workaround based on the Ubuntu discussion here:
    https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-driver-ati/+bug/30426

Basically, Benjamin Herrenschmidt recommends "building the ati driver
from X.org ati-1-0-branch CVS branch". With that, I'm working in X
happily. I'll note that an alternative before that was to use the
"fbdev" driver instead of the "radeon".

-bri