<LAZY WORKAROUND FOUND> Unable to acquire AGP

[Ion Flux]

Hi All,

New poster and total Linux noob here. Anyway, I know it's 2018, but for a bunch of boring reasons I had to resurrect a really old box to run Linux on. SparkyLinux GameOver edition sounded perfect for my needs, and so far, I really like it a lot. However, I hit a pretty big roadblock in setting it up. Here's the story and I hope that someone smarter than me can help me figure it out.

Like I said, it's really old hardware, but the 2D(including desktop)/3D performance is really bad. I started digging around a bit, and I think I've discovered the problem, but I don't know how to fix it.

Current system specs:
Socket 754 nForce3 motherboard, 800 MHz fsb
Sempron 2800+ @ 1.6 GHz
2 x 512 Mb PC3200
Radeon X1650 Pro (RV530) AGP, 512 Mb VRAM
Linux 4.16.0-12.1-liquorix-amd64 (x86_64)
X.Org display driver v1.19.6
OpenGL 2.1 Mesa 18.0.4

1. Running htop shows that
  /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg :0 -seat seat0 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch
is consistently taking up way too many CPU cycles (~12-14%). It doesn't drop below 12% even when I'm not doing anything in the desktop environment.

2. During the boot sequence, I constantly get the error message
[drm: radeon_agp_init] <<ERROR>> Unable to acquire AGP: -19

3. Direct rendering *is* enabled.

4. /proc/interrupts and /var/log/syslog show that the AGP video card is interfacing via the PCI bus, but that there doesn't seem to be any IRQ conflicts.


So it looks like the system can't acquire the AGP interface, so the card runs on the PCI bus despite not having an IRQ address conflict. Does anyone have any suggestions about what to do next (besides getting new hardware)? Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

[Ion Flux]

So I hunted around for a couple of weeks, couldn't find a solution, got bored and installed Linux Mint. The AGP interface is correctly acquired without issue in Mint 18.3. All of the issues I describe above are fixed.