[how-to] 3d hardware acc with ati open source driver.

sonicwim · Posted: Thu Jul 29, 2010 1:28 pm Post subject: Errors digesting ebuild

Hello,

First of all I wonder how up to date the first page of this thread still is because I've decided to give it a try after having a working setup with an Radeon HD 4870 using fglrx going haywire on... Especially in GTK+ based applications, Qt4 is doing a lot better. Compiz still works, except for the occasional borders that dissapear.
I've used the x11 overlay and a lot of swearing to get this working...

Relevant files and info:

xorg.conf

hedmo · Veteran Joined: 29 Aug 2009 Posts: 1305 Location: sweden

sonicwim

do not set fglrx and open sources driver in make.conf (just fglrx or radeon).

i recomend to use fglrx because its easy to setup in kde but if you want to use newer xorg go with
radeon and only radeon in make.conf radeonhd is no good

decide witch driver you want to use and lets go from there

pingufunkybeat · l33t Joined: 01 Dec 2004 Posts: 610

with your card, you will get functioning 3d acceleration with a recent kernel and libdrm, xf86-video-ati and mesa from portage. Preferably using ~x86 or ~amd64.

I suggest trying to get this working first. You can remove xorg.conf while testing, it is not needed with free drivers. Keep in mind that fglrx and the radeon drivers do not like each other, and it's recommended to remove fglrx before installing the free drivers (especially mesa).

If that works, you can switch to the ebuilds from this thread in order to get the bleeding edge git versions.

KDE works like a charm using free drivers, far better than with fglrx. But you're limited to OpenGL 2.0, and the 3d performance is not as good for games.

sonicwim · Posted: Sat Jul 31, 2010 10:58 am Post subject:

Hey hedmo,

I've tried what you suggested and at first it seemed to work but then I tried pingufunkybeat's suggestion but this did not work so I switched back to just fglrx and my problem was back again! :-(

Kinda odd...

pingufunkybeat,

I also noticed a few months ago that xorg.conf is not longer needed but now I also remember what pissed me off then: if I start xdm without an xorg.conf I don't get a window manager but my virtual consoles are also gone then so I have to reset my machine. At first I thought I had just no visual so I tried switching back to the virtual console and stopping xdm but that's not working either.

Xorg.log does not give me any errors so I can't tell what the problem is...

And I don't really care about if the driver is open source, free or anything, I'd just like a working setup.
Preformance is aslo not an issue, I still use Windows for gaming.

Regards,

Wimmy

PS: You'll probably have to wait a few weeks for a reaction because I'm leaving for a 2 week holiday tomorrow. I better start packing! :-D

pingufunkybeat · l33t Joined: 01 Dec 2004 Posts: 610

You can only remove xorg.conf with the free drivers. You still need xorg.conf for fglrx.

If you can give more details about what did not work, we can help you debug the free drivers. I don't have any experience with fglrx, so I can't help there.

sonicwim · Posted: Sat Jul 31, 2010 4:41 pm Post subject:

I've did some more diggin' on the net and now it seems to work!

I've put this in /make.conf:

pingufunkybeat · l33t Joined: 01 Dec 2004 Posts: 610

Compiz should simply work. What happens when you start X in failsafe mode and try to launch compiz from the xterm? Any errors?

Give us the output of "glxinfo |grep ender". That will tells us more about your current setup.

Also, you can remove anything from your "VIDEO_CARDS" other than "radeon vesa". RadeonHD driver is deprecated and the rest isn't needed.

sonicwim · Posted: Sat Jul 31, 2010 10:21 pm Post subject:

As requested:

pingufunkybeat · l33t Joined: 01 Dec 2004 Posts: 610

The good news is that you have hardware acceleration working -- you are using accelerated DRI path and not the software rasterizer. So the driver is working.

The bad news is that compiz is not working, and this is a bit odd. The driver should certainly be able to handle it.

Which kernel are you using? If not, I suggest switching to 2.6.34 (or 35, which is coming out one of these days). Also, I notice that you are using the older user mode switching (DRI), which will only give you OpenGL 1.5. You can enable kernel modesetting by default in your kernel config (it's under staging drivers), then you'll get OpenGL 2.0 and DRI2. This might be worth a try, but I'm not sure if Compiz needs it.

You should try to see if simple 3d applications: glxgears, openarena, supertuxkart, neverball, etc. work.

Also, could you post the output of:

equery l libdrm
equery l mesa
equery l xf86-video-ati
dmesg | grep drm

pingufunkybeat · l33t Joined: 01 Dec 2004 Posts: 610

Also, run this as root:

eselect opengl set xorg-x11

hedmo · Veteran Joined: 29 Aug 2009 Posts: 1305 Location: sweden

I belive compiz is not working because of low fps got to get over
1000fps to start compiz.

Code: glxgears

pingufunkybeat · l33t Joined: 01 Dec 2004 Posts: 610

No way.

I don't get 1000 fps in gears, and I'm running KWin GL effects just fine.

Glxgears numbers are worthless.

hedmo · Veteran Joined: 29 Aug 2009 Posts: 1305 Location: sweden

jepp kwin works just fine .but when switch from classic to gallium my fps dropping to 30 fps
and compic is gone

pingufunkybeat wrote: Glxgears numbers are worthless.

maybe but for me it has always been a guideline to start compiz

sonicwim

if you want to try fglrx here a quick howto

emerge -av xorg-server ati-drivers

/opt/bin/aticonfig --initial --input=/etc/X11/xorg.conf

eselect opengl set ati

emerge portage: qlist -I -C x11drivers/

/opt/bin/aticonfig --initial --input=/etc/X11/xorg.conf is the same as Xorg -configure=building a default xorg.conf

pingufunkybeat · l33t Joined: 01 Dec 2004 Posts: 610

Gallium for r600 is far from ready. It's a wonder if it works at all.

hedmo · Veteran Joined: 29 Aug 2009 Posts: 1305 Location: sweden

it should work i am on rv350 and gallium works if i set xinerama "on " in xorg.conf outherwise i get seg...fault
but if i set it =no compiz so i use:

eselect mesa set r300 classic

eselect mesa set sw gallium

pingufunkybeat · l33t Joined: 01 Dec 2004 Posts: 610

Yeah, but r300c is a completely different and much more mature driver which has worked for ages.

sonicwim (and most of the other people in here) needs to use r600c, which was experimental until very recently.

DaggyStyle · Watchman Joined: 22 Mar 2006 Posts: 5909

pingufunkybeat · l33t Joined: 01 Dec 2004 Posts: 610

What I meant was "if it works with Compiz/KWin at all", since we were talking about that.

But r600g is shaping up nicely, and I'm looking forward to it. Apparently, you can even run OpenArena with it, but there are textures missing and stuff.

ssteinberg · Apprentice Joined: 09 Jul 2010 Posts: 206 Location: Israel

r600 Gallium seg faults on glxgears for me so it is far far from ready to run anything correctly.
Also r600 with OS drivers has no support what-so-ever for DXT compression (aka S3TC) and requires pre-compressed textures, so games who retardly enough don't supply precompressed textures (like Regnum) won't work without ATi's drivers. Driconf and libtxc will give you the S3TC_texture_compression extension, but it can't compress textures on r600 with git mesa. This and lack of GLSL >1.1 support is a big turn off if you are planning on doing gaming.
I also had trouble with Compiz on OS drivers but metacity's composition works just fine. And it has absolutely nothing to do with meaningless glxgears score, which is only useful to determine whether or not hardware acceleration actually works.

sonicwim · Posted: Sun Aug 15, 2010 3:54 pm Post subject:

Hello,

I'm back now and I saw this is quite hot a topic for some of you...

Anyway, I've got some answering to do so here goes:

Code:

pingu ~ # uname -a
Linux pingu 2.6.34-gentoo-r1 #5 SMP Sat Jul 17 15:57:43 CEST 2010 i686 Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q9550 @ 2.83GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

glxgears works but clearly uses CPU rendering, the framerates are too low and CPU usage spikes to 100% when I run it...

Code:

pingu ~ # equery l libdrm
[ Searching for package 'libdrm' in all categories among: ]
* installed packages
[I--] [ ] x11-libs/libdrm-2.4.20-r1 (0)
pingu ~ # equery l mesa
[ Searching for package 'mesa' in all categories among: ]
* installed packages
[I--] [ ] media-libs/mesa-7.8.2 (0)
[I--] [ ] x11-apps/mesa-progs-7.7 (0)
pingu ~ # equery l xf86-video-ati
[ Searching for package 'xf86-video-ati' in all categories among: ]
* installed packages
[I--] [ ] x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati-6.13.0 (0)
pingu ~ # dmesg | grep drm
[drm] Initialized drm 1.1.0 20060810
[drm] radeon defaulting to userspace modesetting.
[drm] Initialized radeon 1.33.0 20080528 for 0000:01:00.0 on minor 0
[drm] Setting GART location based on new memory map
[drm] Loading RV770 CP Microcode
[drm] Resetting GPU
[drm] writeback test succeeded in 1 usecs

Wimmy

DaggyStyle · Watchman Joined: 22 Mar 2006 Posts: 5909

Kingoftherings · Guru Joined: 04 May 2008 Posts: 328

ssteinberg · Apprentice Joined: 09 Jul 2010 Posts: 206 Location: Israel

sonicwim · Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2010 8:36 am Post subject:

I've enabled mode setting in the the kernel but after a reboot there were some complaints that firmware bit R700_rlc.bin could not be loaded.

So I did some more searching and used a firmware file that I found int this thread: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-815801-highlight-r700rlc+bin.html but then my screen goes blank after the card has been initialised at boot time or should I call it shot down because after a few minutes my box starts beeping and resets itself. I can't find any errors in the messages file either.

Now I'm using my older kernel because even after clearing the EXTRA_FIRMWARE and EXTRA_FIRMWARE_DIR (the file itself I've put in /lib/firmware/radeon) I still can't boot again with kernel 2.6.34...

I guess God hates me or something like that!

Wimmy