Accelerated 2D with ati R6xx and open source driver [SOLVED]

Fran · Last edited by Fran on Thu Jun 04, 2009 6:39 pm; edited 1 time in total

I'm trying to get accelerated 2D in my Radeon HD 3850 using an open source driver (radeon or radeonhd, I don't care). But the only thing I get when I start X is a black screen (if I don't enable kernel modesetting) or the monitor in standby mode (with kernel modesetting enabled). I've tried different live branches of libdrm, mesa and radeon, to no avail. The logs don't show any error: http://pastebin.com/m184f677b (without KMS) and http://pastebin.com/m7982b6a6 (with KMS). So before I keep digging, I would like to hear of someone who has actually managed to get a working X server with the radeon or radeonhd drivers and a r6xx/r7xx card (and also, which versions/live branches he uses). If nobody has managed to get it working, I'll simply wait some weeks before trying again.

Thanks

(Solution: uninstall fglrx).
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~amd64 10.0 // linux-3.4 // gcc-4.7 // glibc-2.15 // xorg-server-1.12 // openbox-3.5

eccerr0r · Advocate Joined: 01 Jul 2004 Posts: 2354 Location: USA

Not sure if this is helpful, but I've gotten my Radeon HD 3650 (RV650) working with x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati-6.12.2 ... I did need to use a prerelase 2.6.30 kernel but it looks like you're using that already. 2D accel appears to work; moving windows is fairly quick; but 3D is emulated (works, but deathly slow).

I went back to the closed-source drivers as ... why bother having this card (until 3d works with the radeonhd driver), it's installed in a machine with a G31 chipset motherboard...
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Core2Quad 9550S/4GB/4x500G RAID5/RadeonHD 5770
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Fran · Posted: Thu Jun 04, 2009 6:14 am Post subject:

scary · n00b Joined: 17 Apr 2004 Posts: 47

hi, actually 2d should work on your card even without digging into live ebuilds. For me, latest ~amd64 xorg-server and xf86-video-ati work just fine (as well as live ebuilds anyway, aside from power management) on the hd3470 card on my laptop. Could it be some monitor-related wrong setting? What do you have in your xorg.conf? Oh and afaik KMS still has no effect on radeon.. we'd have to wait for 2.6.31/32

Fran · Posted: Thu Jun 04, 2009 8:19 am Post subject:

I just tried with non-live versions of libdrm (2.4.11), mesa (7.5-rc2) and ati (6.12.2) and nothing, still a black screen/monitor in standby (I did get a corrupted screen once, but it was only once).

scary · n00b Joined: 17 Apr 2004 Posts: 47

wow that looks very interesting! Didn't know about that... but still, are you sure that it isn't all that experimental stuff that's actually breaking X on your system ? By that I mean, have you tried using a vanilla kernel, not just a patched kernel with the kms options disabled ?
I must admit that I don't even use the framebuffer console :oops: , so I don't know if these things are somewhat related.. maybe you could try just disabling completely fb and see what happens ?

Fran · Posted: Thu Jun 04, 2009 9:43 am Post subject:

scary · n00b Joined: 17 Apr 2004 Posts: 47

I also think that mesa should be unrelated... but if I understand correctly the whole thing somehow worked with fglrx, right ?
Does your card have several video outputs ? Have you tried plugging the monitor to the 2nd one? I know it's a bit lame, but I had this kind of trouble ages ago with my ati 9800 card that was sending its signal only to the 2nd video out for some reason... but I guess that kind of things is fixed by now :)
I would also try to fiddle with the Monitor subsection in xorg.conf .. not that I'd know where to start :D

pingufunkybeat · l33t Joined: 01 Dec 2004 Posts: 610

I have full 2D acceleration using "radeon" driver from portage (6.12.2).

I'm using the drm compiled from git (no ebuilds), as described here: http://www.x.org/wiki/radeon:r6xx_r7xx_branch

That's all I needed to do, and 2D acceleration and compositing is working great. The only problem I have is that sometimes repainting is sloppy when compositing is turned on (some kind of XFIXES issue), so I've disabled it. But when it's enables, many KDE effects like expose and animations work really well and are supported -- as long as you set the compositing backend to XRender in the KWin settings.

You shouldn't need the custom drm if you're using a 30 kernel, as it was merged in. Still, you might want to disable radeon drm in the kernel and compile this one as a module and see if it works. Perhaps you forgot to compile the proper drm, or the patch you're using is interfering with it, or something. It really shouldn't be hard.

ConnClark · n00b Joined: 15 Aug 2007 Posts: 54

I have no troubles using the current git build of radeonhd and a git pull of the drm as described here http://wiki.x.org/wiki/radeonhd%3Ar6xx_r7xx_branch .

If you get 2d accel working with those builds and you want even faster 2d performance for r6xx/r7xx cards using radeonhd, you can try my patch found here http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=271923 .

It speeds things up by 5 to 10% as measured with the gtkperf benchmark.
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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.

Fran · Posted: Thu Jun 04, 2009 6:38 pm Post subject:

God, I finally found the solution. Digging in the Xorg.?.logs I couldn't find any solution, so I went to /var/log/gdm. And there was a weird error:

pingufunkybeat · l33t Joined: 01 Dec 2004 Posts: 610

Oh, yeah, you need to completely remove the fglrx and reboot, as it messes up a bunch of things for the open source drivers. Switching between the open drivers and fglrx is not that easy as a result.

Fran · Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2009 6:50 am Post subject:

scary · n00b Joined: 17 Apr 2004 Posts: 47

so does xf86-video-ati + radeon kms work ? did you try ? If so, then I have something to waste my weekend on :)

Fran · Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2009 7:56 am Post subject: