radeon or radeonhd, any reliable and up-to-date guide?

i92guboj

After having looked for the last few months around a lot of times in a lot of places I haven't yet managed to make either radeon or radeonhd work with this video card:

Elv13 · Posted: Thu Jun 11, 2009 5:03 am Post subject:

Why would you want to switch from radeon to radeonHD? Radeon will probably have a stable 3D support before radeonHD and in the current state, 2D accel is probably more stable on radeon than radeonHD. And why don't you just ude FGLRX, your card is supported.

i92guboj · Posted: Thu Jun 11, 2009 5:44 am Post subject:

Thanks for taking the time to answer.

ConnClark · n00b Joined: 15 Aug 2007 Posts: 54

i92guboj,

It sounds as though you are having troubles with getting DRI working.

looking art your paste bin post, this seems to be your problem

(**) RADEONHD(0): Option "DRI" "off"

Set Option "DRI" "on"

Elv13,

Radeon and radeonhd have almost identical 2d accel code. They are also waiting on the exact same code for 3d support. Radeonhd has one advantage that radeon doesn't and thats playing sound out the HDMI connector. Also I have written a patch that lets radeonhd outperform radeon in 2D if you have an r6xx or r7xx chip. http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=271923
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i92guboj · Posted: Thu Jun 11, 2009 7:52 pm Post subject:

ConnClark · n00b Joined: 15 Aug 2007 Posts: 54

For any acceleration on r6xx or r7xx chips you must have DRI set to on.

If I were you I would try kernel 2.6.30 and the non overlay versions of mesa , libdrm, and radeonhd
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i92guboj · Posted: Thu Jun 11, 2009 8:35 pm Post subject:

I'll try again. But it would surprise me if it worked. As I said on my other post, I've tried dozens of times, and until I've used live versions of everything this last time, it never worked at all for me. X would freeze at startup.

Oh, what about the cloned screens thing? That alone would make this driver useless for me. I don't care about fanciness like 3d or hdmi at all, but I *need* my two screens to work.
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ConnClark · n00b Joined: 15 Aug 2007 Posts: 54

Lets deal with one problem at a time. First we will get it working then we can worry about multiple screens.

The hanging up could be due to flgrx being installed. refer to this thread http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-768839.html
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In formal computer science advances are made by standing on the shoulders of giants. Linux has shown that, if there are enough of you, you can advance just as far by stepping on each others toes.

i92guboj · Posted: Thu Jun 11, 2009 8:51 pm Post subject:

Then, the fglrx might be true because I've just booted X with radeonhd 1.2.5.

I changed dri to on, no corruption so far, but it's still so damn slow. This is what I see in my log, related to dri:

ConnClark · n00b Joined: 15 Aug 2007 Posts: 54

try emerging x11-libs/libdrm-2.4.9

Thats the one that is working for me at the moment

Okay I just saw your last edit,

try Mesa 7.4.2
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In formal computer science advances are made by standing on the shoulders of giants. Linux has shown that, if there are enough of you, you can advance just as far by stepping on each others toes.

i92guboj · Posted: Thu Jun 11, 2009 9:33 pm Post subject:

My libdrm is 2.4.11. Mesa is already 7.4.2.

After I re-emerged xorg-server it kind of worked. At least now the log doesn't complain. But I get screen corruption of the worst kind. I'll script something to get a screenshot because I can't even operate normally. The logs show everything is ok now at least:

http://pastebin.ca/1457108

However X is unusable unless I turn DRI off.

Edited:

This is with dri on:

http://jesgue.homelinux.org/other-files/foo.jpg

This is with dri off (how it should look):

http://jesgue.homelinux.org/other-files/bar.jpg

As you can see, it's not a minor glitch, however the wm loads and it reacts to my keybindings (so I can even close it cleanly, which is something at least). It's just the visual which is garbled to an extent that it can't even be used.

Another edit: by the way, using radeon instead of radeonhd with the same exact config file (except for the driver line), yields exactly the same result. Performance this way is really awful, I think I am damned to use fglrx and kernel 2.6.28 for a couple of years. :lol:

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ConnClark · n00b Joined: 15 Aug 2007 Posts: 54

I have been looking through the mailing list and I have some thing to try

try adding the options

Option "ExaNoDownloadFromScreen"
Option "ExaNoUploadToScreen"

and see what happens
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In formal computer science advances are made by standing on the shoulders of giants. Linux has shown that, if there are enough of you, you can advance just as far by stepping on each others toes.

nightmorph · Developer Joined: 23 Jan 2005 Posts: 1382 Location: SoCal

I know you're running an AGP card, and that there are some special problems reported with AGP cards. My card is PCIe, but I hope the following steps will still prove useful.

Today I just received my new RadeonHD 4550 and plugged it in. It works just fine with xf86-video-ati, using only packages in the Portage tree. It's not supposed to be complicated now that the proper DRM is in the latest kernel. You should not need a single overlay package, and only a few packages from ~arch.

1. Use gentoo-sources-2.6.30-r1. It's in ~arch.
2. The other ~arch packages you'll need are mesa and libdrm. Stable xorg-server is okay.
3. Configure your kernel:
- Activate the toplevel agpgart option (should already be selected), but don't need to select any of the Via/Intel/SiS chipsets. Those are special edge cases. No worries if your exact chipset (nvidia, ati, etc.) isn't listed.
- Select the radeon DRM option as a module, not built-in. All the graphics-related options should be modules.
- Deactivate radeonfb if it's selected. You can use uvesafb if you need a framebuffer driver.
- Deactivate the PAT option if it's selected. Right now PAT is really sucking for most users. Stick to plain old MTRRs, regardless of what the kernel documentation suggests.
4. Compile and install kernel.
5. Edit xorg.conf. While you can theoretically run without one, set a few options in it to eliminate potential troubles. Here's mine:

ConnClark · n00b Joined: 15 Aug 2007 Posts: 54

nightmorph,

i92guboj is experiencing issues that are above and beyond normal install problems. It may be due to the fact that his card is an AGP card and their are some known breakages with AGP at the moment.
_________________
In formal computer science advances are made by standing on the shoulders of giants. Linux has shown that, if there are enough of you, you can advance just as far by stepping on each others toes.

i92guboj · gentoo-sources-2.6.30-r1

nightmorph · Developer Joined: 23 Jan 2005 Posts: 1382 Location: SoCal

i92guboj · Posted: Fri Jun 12, 2009 12:02 am Post subject:

M · Guru Joined: 12 Dec 2006 Posts: 414

i92guboj · Posted: Fri Jun 12, 2009 7:38 am Post subject:

I've tried that already. The latest and greatest from the overlay has the same problems than the versions in portage right now.

However, next time I reboot I'll check the OpenGL renderer, just in case...
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i92guboj · Posted: Wed Jun 17, 2009 8:25 am Post subject:

So it finally happened. With the update to xorg-server 1.6 I have finally been left without an option to use my video card.

Both radeon and radeonhd work without acceleration and cloning both monitors, unusable to all purposes.

Current fglrx won't even start the new x server.

So I guess that the future for me is framebuffer :p

Ideas are welcome of course

By the way, I've tried disabling one monitor but it's the same (not that I could work without it anyway).

EDITED:

See, this is what I was talking about. I have no idea what the concepts of "on" and "off" mean for this driver. I am now trying radeon just to change a bit and I am using explicitly this option in my xorg.conf:

M · Guru Joined: 12 Dec 2006 Posts: 414

This is what I meant, from your log

(II) AIGLX: Loaded and initialized /usr/lib64/dri/swrast_dri.so
(II) GLX: Initialized DRISWRAST GL provider for screen 0

that is software rasterizer, try with glxinfo | grep renderer , in my case currently that is
OpenGL renderer string: GeForce 6150SE nForce 430/PCI/SSE2

With DRI off software rasterizer will load anyway, but I think without DRI exa will not work at all, maybe better post xorg log with DRI on.

i92guboj · Posted: Wed Jun 17, 2009 9:16 pm Post subject:

Yep, I saw that and I know it's software, even if I didn't know I could tell by the awful performance.

Here you are the log with DRI on: http://pastebin.ca/1464067

The problem is that with DRI on the whole screen is garbled and I can't do anything. The problem is not how to enable it. It is enabled, and it loads, everything is ok, except I can't see anything but garbage in my screen. The only error I can see is this: