HP 8740w + Dell FirePro M6000 help

[Lwerewolf]

General setup:

HP 8740w, 820QM, 4x4GB, some intel wifi mpci-e card, 1TB M550

GFX: HP M7820 (5870m, stock), Dell M6000 (7870m supposedly)

What happens:

• Boot
  
  • Black screen, I can get it to boot to linux (mint x64) reliably, windows seems to BSOD with a "general hardware error" (pci-e, probably a driver doing a no-op?)
    

  [*]Linux

  • Open-source driver (radeon):
    
    • Working as normal, even fired up warsow
      
    • Dmesg shows errors trying to raise clocks
      
      • pretty bad performance
        

    [*]FGLRX driver (AMD Proprietary binary blob):

    • Black screen
      
    • SSH-ing to the laptop + dmesg | grep fglrx reveals the following:
      
      • [ 5.103269] <6>[fglrx] vendor: 1002 device: 6825 count: 1
        [ 5.104278] <6>[fglrx] ioport: bar 4, base 0x5000, size: 0x100
        [ 5.104603] <6>[fglrx] Kernel PAT support is enabled
        [ 5.104630] <6>[fglrx] module loaded - fglrx 13.35.5 [Mar 12 2014] with 1 minors
        [ 6.625545] <3>[fglrx:hal_read_VBIOS] *ERROR* Invalid AMD VBIOS at bus 1!
        [ 6.625549] <3>[fglrx:hal_init_gpu] *ERROR* Failed to read VBIOS!
        [ 6.625551] <6>[fglrx] device open failed with code -1
        [ 6.626712] <3>[fglrx:firegl_get_vbios_image] *ERROR* Invalid image size requested
        [ 6.627593] <3>[fglrx:firegl_cail_query_parameter] *ERROR* CAIL_QueryParameter failed
        

  [*]Windows (7, ultimate, x64, catalyst):

  • Was able to successfully boot and remote desktop to it only twice:
    
    • First time, code 12, hd7800 series
      
    • Second time, video function wasn't even enumerated in device manager ?!
      
    • Lots of unsuccessful tries between the first and second time, plus afterwards
      
      • MEMORY.DMP viewed with windbg reveals that it's a WHEA_UNCORRECTABLE_ERROR (124), pci-e error (no-op again?)
        

  [*]AtiFlash (ms-dos removable usb stick, recorded logs with msdos piping, missed the fact that atiflash can save logs to a file):

  • -i
    
    • adapter bn dn dID asic flash romsize test bios p/n
      ======= == == ==== ==== ======= ======= === =======
      0 01 00 6825 Verde R600 SPI 10000 fail -
      

    [*] -ai

    • Adapter 0 (BN=01, DN=00, PCIID=68251002, SSID=1520103C)
      Asic Family : Verde
      Flash Type : R600 SPI (64 KB)
      No VBIOS
      

    [*]-p (attempting to program an m6000 vBIOS taken from techpowerup's site)

    • Failed to read ROM
      ERROR : press '1' to continue
      

    [*]-s

    • Failed to read ROM
      

    [*]-unlockrom

    • ROM Unlocked
      

Notes:

• The m6000 does have a vBIOS chip on it
  
• The 8740w's BIOS appears to be overriding the m6000's pci subsystem id to an HP value
  
  • maybe the proprietary drivers get confused by this and access wrong BARs / wrong offsets / something like that?
    

Questions:

• What is the open-source driver doing differently to make it work?
  
• What do you think is causing the issue in the first place?
  
• What can I attempt to make it work?
  
  • DSDT overrides / forced PCI realloc, I guess?
    
  • Maybe the windows driver is causing error 12 because it can't find the vBIOS?
    

  [*]If I want to get into ACPI/DSDTs and etc, are there any intermediary steps or should I go straight to reading the ACPI spec?

  • I have some knowledge on how PCI-E and device drivers work in general (well, I program device drivers, but not video drivers ).
    

Thanks in advance for ANY insight in what might be going wrong!