On Sun, 15 Mar 2026 at 13:40, Haines Brown <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 15, 2026 at 07:23:31AM -0400, Dan Ritter wrote:
> > Haines Brown wrote:
> > > The GPU chip on my motherboard died, and so I plugged in a cheap
> > > video card, a maxsun AMD Radeon R5 220 2GB Graphics Card. As the
> > > result my resolution is locked at 1024 x 768, which makes work
> > > very difficult.
[...]
> > > The graphics card supports my desired resolution of 1920x1080, but it
> > > is not accessible.
[...]
> > Go look in your logs.
You are not looking in enough of the right places. See my comments below.
> There is no screen section. I find that the log file has no mention of
> AMDGPU. It does have
> 114.498] (==) Using system config directory "/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d"
> 114.499] (==) No Layout section. Using the first Screen section.
> 114.499] (==) No screen section available. Using defaults.
> 114.499] (**) |-->Screen "Default Screen Section" (0)
> 114.499] (**) | |-->Monitor "<default monitor>"
> 114.499] (==) No monitor specified for screen "Default Screen Section".
> Using a default monitor configuration.
> ...
> 114.667] (II) LoadModule: "radeon"
> 114.667] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/radeon_drv.so
>
> 114.670] (II) RADEON: Driver for ATI/AMD Radeon chipsets:
> ATI Radeon Mobility X600 (M24), ATI FireMV 2400,
> ATI Radeon Mobility X300 (M24), ATI FireGL M24 GL,
> ...
>
> This starts a very long list of drivers. None have "220" in their name.
>
> The log continues with
>
> 114.670] (II) modesetting: Driver for Modesetting Kernel Drivers: kms
> 114.670] (II) FBDEV: driver for framebuffer: fbdev
> 114.670] (II) VESA: driver for VESA chipsets: vesa
> 114.670] (II) [KMS] drm report modesetting isn't supported.
> 114.670] (EE) open /dev/dri/card0: No such file or directory
> 114.670] (WW) Falling back to old probe method for modesetting
> 114.670] (EE) open /dev/dri/card0: No such file or directory
> 114.670] (II) Loading sub module "fbdevhw"
> ...
> 114.671] ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 25.2
> 114.671] (EE) Unable to find a valid framebuffer device
> 114.671] (WW) Falling back to old probe method for fbdev
> ...
> 114.671] (II) FBDEV(3): using default device
> 114.671] vesa: Refusing to run on UEFI
> 114.671] (EE) Screen 0 deleted because of no matching config section.
> 114.671] (II) UnloadModule: "radeon"
> 114.671] (EE) Screen 0 deleted because of no matching config section.
> 114.671] (II) UnloadModule: "modesetting"
> 114.671] (EE) Screen 0 deleted because of no matching config section.
> 114.671] (II) UnloadModule: "fbdev"
> 114.671] (II) UnloadSubModule: "fbdevhw"
> 114.671] (II) FBDEV(0): Creating default Display subsection in Screen
> secti>
> "Default Screen Section" for depth/fbbpp 24/32
> 114.671] (==) FBDEV(0): Depth 24, (==) framebuffer bpp 32
> I don't understand much of this, but no evidence that the AMDGPU drive
> is being loaded. I find that /dev/ does not have a /dri subdirectory. On
> a working machine it is present and holds card0 and other files. Scree
> secion does not exist.
Hi, I am not an expert in any of this, particularly the ridiculous rabbit
hole of AMD marketing.
However I did enough research to get a different ancient AMD graphics card
to work on Debian 12. Following a similar path for yours finds this:
[1] says about the "Radeon 200 series":
TeraScale 2 (VLIW5) (Northern Islands or Evergreen) is found on R5 235X
and below branded products.
It appears that your "R5 220" is one of these "below branded" products,
according to the "Cards" list at [1].
[2] says about the "Terascale" products:
The "successor" of this technology is "Graphics Core Next 1" aka GCN1.
So it seems that your card is not newer than GCN 1.2, because it is
"succeeded" by (ie before) GCN1.
[3] says about Debian packages:
xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu package [...] will officially cover any cards
that are part of GCN 1.2 ("GCN 3rd generation") or newer.
This suggests that you do NOT need the xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu
package.
[3] says about Debian packages:
Support for GCN 1.1 and older chips is also provided by the
xserver-xorg-video-ati driver wrapper package, which depends on three
hardware-specific driver packages:
xserver-xorg-video-mach64
xserver-xorg-video-r128
xserver-xorg-video-radeon"
This suggests that you need the xserver-xorg-video-ati package installed.
Do you have that?
These commands give useful information:
$ apt list --installed 'xserver-xorg-video-*'
$ sudo dmesg | grep -iE 'amdgpu|drm|radeon'
$ inxi -GxxSM -y1
Links:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_200_series
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeraScale_(microarchitecture)#TeraScale_2
[3] https://wiki.debian.org/AtiHowTo#Drivers says:
