X11 segfaults in official fglrx-driver (ati) on arch linux

Question

Some days ago, I installed ArchLinux on my HP 8200 Elite because it's one of the distros that actually work with my new hardware.

Now I wanted to run an Xorg-server which works perfectly using vesa as driver. But as I have an ATI Radeon HD 6570, I would like to use the original proprietary driver from ATI.

Therefore I followed the instructions on Arch's Wiki for ATI Catalyst in the section about the custom kernels. Perfectly created and installed the package without any error. The only thing I changed was to build the original arch-kernel again but adding some Intel network drivers, that's why I need the custom kernel.

Trying to start the xserver with the original fglrx-driver ends up in a segfault when running startx

Here's my /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier "Monitor0"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Device0"
#   Driver      "vesa"
#   ^- with this option it works
    Driver      "fglrx"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier  "Screen0"
    Device      "Device0"
    Monitor     "Monitor0"
    DefaultDepth    16
    SubSection  "Display"
        Depth   16
        Modes   "1920x1200" # runs in 1600x1200 only in VESA-mode?!
    EndSubSection
EndSection

To not spam up the post, here's the /var/log/Xorg.0.log

# uname -a
Linux myhost 2.6.38.4-ARCH-tobi #1 SMP PREEMPT Sat Apr 23 13:57:07 CEST 2011 x86_64 Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.4GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

If you need more information about my architecture, let me know.

Any idea why this is happening or what I could do against is really appreciated.

Answer 1

Don't use fglrx. Use the open-source ATI driver, which seems to be called xf86-video-ati on Arch Linux. This will work perfectly fine unless of course you plan to run games on this machine.