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  • Graphical glitches with [AMD/ATI] RV610/M74 [Mobility Radeon HD 2400 XT]

Probably since the first updates after the outtage, my parents encounter graphical glitches on their 2007 iMac.
Especially using Brave/Firefox, these glitches appear every now and then near mouse cursor when hovering over pictures/links. Also, scrolling is slow and buggy. A few times, cursor turned into glitch, could still be moved, but clicking was not possible.

ee@solus ~ $ lspci | grep VGA
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
[AMD/ATI] RV610/M74 [Mobility Radeon HD 2400 XT]

I should also mention that they still are on kernel 5.14.21-210.current, since UEFI partition is only around 100MB on Mac and kernel wont update during system update due to lack of space.
Futher, they are using Solus Mate.

I tried a rollback to pre-outtage, did not succeed because nvidia-390-glx-driver-modaliases is missing/deprecated.

So, are these graphical issues due to the deprecation of this nvidia-driver, if so, is there anything I can do about it? Computer is not really usable like this as a daily driver.

One last question: iMac has this above mentioned AMD Radeon graphics card, why is/was there a nvidia driver installed. What am I missing here?

Any help appreciated.

they still are on kernel 5.14.21-210.current

That's a recipe for trouble. The longer this goes on, the more likely things are to break. I strongly recommend a reinstall with a properly sized ESP.

So, are these graphical issues due to the deprecation of this nvidia-driver, if so, is there anything I can do about it?

No, that driver shouldn't affect this hardware at all.

One last question: iMac has this above mentioned AMD Radeon graphics card, why is/was there a nvidia driver installed. What am I missing here?

The modaliases packages are just for hardware detection, and are on every system for use by e.g. our "Hardware Drivers" utility. They don't contain the drivers themselves.

    Staudey Yes, definetely have to scrap OSX on this machine and make a fresh install with properly sized ESP.
    Meanwhile, is it possible to put the deprecated nvidia-390-glx-driver-modaliases in a local repository and then do a rollback? How would I do that?

    This machine is just not usable at the moment, frequent glitches, mouse cursor just turned into a grey square.

      Staudey Concerning the kernel, would it be possible/advisable to bring the system to the current kernel by something like: boot live cd, copy kernel to UEFI-Partition, chroot to the system and update boot-loader?

          I usually avoid messing with the ESP too much. I think people have posted steps to do something like that before, but personally I'm not comfortable walking someone through it.

          Regarding the previous question, I think it should be possible to create a local repository, add an old modaliases packages from here (before they're completely removed from the server) eopkg index it, add the repo URL to eopkg (because I think it supports file:// URLS) and then do a eopkg hs -t rollback

            14 days later

            Staudey I had trouble with the local repo. After I added it, eopkg gave me a unknown url type error while doing the rollback. So I removed the local repo again, just installed the downloaded nvidia-390-glx-driver-modaliases package manually and did the rollback.
            I will leave it at that and plan to do a fresh install on this machine in the near future to also resolve the UEFI partition problem.
            Thanks for your help.

              • [deleted]

              • Post #7

              Sebastian You could boot live, then shrink the Solus partition a bit and grow the ESP partition a bit (preferably 512mb, I think).

                  4 days later

                  [deleted] Thank you for the hint, but this will not be possible. Inbetween the Solus and the ESP parttion are one ore more Mac partitions with Mac OSX and recovery stuff (it is a dual boot machine). It is virtually impossible to shrink these partitions at the beginning. I read somewhere that it might be possible to create just a second ESP partition. But that is all too much trouble for me.

                      • [deleted]

                      • Post #9
                      • Edited

                      Sebastian Yeah, I'd imagine you'd have to scrap OSX in that case.