On 04/10/2010 01:26 PM, Mark Knecht wrote:
Dave,
Thanks. Those are very good inputs. I'm using KMS on an Intel Gfx
box so I'll reacquaint myself what I did there. I'll also look at 1
monitor instead of two, DVI vs VGA adapter, etc. Good stuff.
I tried starting X this morning for the first time and that made me
realize I probably want the radeonhd driver and not the plain radeon?
(ATI HD 5770 on the box) However the radeonhd feature list looks like
early days:
http://wiki.x.org/wiki/radeonhd%3Afeature
No! Absolutely not! The "radeonhd" driver has no support for Evergreen
at all, and it sees very little attention these days.
Only "radeon" supports KMS for ATI GPUs, and only "radeon" has beginning
support for Evergreen series cards.
I used "radeonhd" when I first installed my HD 4850 card last Fall, and
I really appreciate all of the work done by the "radeonhd" developers.
Since that time, "radeon" has been developed to the point that it
surpasses "radeonhd" in features and performance in almost every
conceivable aspect, so for many months I have been directing people
exclusively towards "radeon" (and away from "radeonhd"). For KMS (with
ATI hardware) and/or Evergreen support, the only open source driver is
"radeon."
The wiki link you provided clearly shows no support for Evergreen in
"radeonhd".
I think the other thing right now is to understand exatly what
version of xorg is required, and then what kernel config options are
required to do it right. If you want to post any info about that it
would be helpful. In the meantime I just need to go do some reading
and see what the Wiki says.
Specific information to help you get the required software depends on
what distribution you are using, and how old the version of that
distribution.
Some general information is available in these news articles:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nzk0Ng
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODEzNA
If you are not used to doing activities related to administering your
system, then trying to get Evergreen support (until the major
distributions release new versions this Spring, which should be soon)
could be daunting.
For example, I am a Debian user. Sometimes the package maintainers get
behind (they are voluteers), which required me to learn how to build my
own packages from source last Fall when I was trying to get my HD 4850
to work. (Right now, Debian has very close to cutting edge packages,
except it provides no kernels with Evergreen support, so I have to
package up test kernels myself.)
Possibly, your distribution may provide special repositories where you
can obtain very cutting-edge versions of software. I believe Ubuntu
does this, and Fedora and OpenSUSE as well. (If you don't use one of
those, hopefully you are familiar with forums, mailing lists, etc.,
where you can ask about this.)
I'm not sure what skill level you are at. In my situation (with
Debian), I could not do the testing I want to do without building a few
packages from source. Here is a list of software packages I have to use
to test my Evergreen card on Debian:
SOURCE CODE NAME Debian PACKAGE NAME(s)
Linux kernel from special
"drm-radeon-testing" branch [none]
or
Linux kernel 2.6.34-rc3
(or higher) [none]
libdrm 2.4.17 (or higher) libdrm-dev
libdrm-intel1
libdrm-radeon1
libdrm2
xorg-server 1.7 (or higher) xserver-common
xserver-xorg-core
xserver-xorg-dev
xf86-video-ati 6.12.191 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
(or higher)
The source code used by all of the distributions for their packages
comes from the same locations. (This is called "upstream".) But they
tend to adopt their own package names for the compiled forms of that
software, and (as you can see) those names are often somewhat different
than the name of the sources from which they are built. It takes a
little while to get familiar with everything, including the naming issues.
Oops! Looking back at your previous messages in this thread, I see that
you are using Gentoo:
gentoo-sources-2.6.33-r1
xorg-drivers-1.7
mesa-7.5.2
xf86-video-radeonhd-1.3.0
Mesa has no Evergreen support yet, though you might be able to use
software rasterizing Mesa packages to use some games/graphics programs
that aren't too demanding. As mentioned by myself and others, you need
to abandon "radeonhd" and use "radeon" instead. You also need a package
called libdrm, and it needs to be built with the special drivers for
Radeon hardware enabled. (I had to build libdrm myself for a while,
because Debian wasn't enabling Radeon support, by they started enabling
that support in January.)
To sum up, you should try to get the latest possible versions of all of
the packages I listed:
- linux kernel built from "drm-radeon-testing" (2.6.32 or 2.6.33), or
(preferably) a release candidate of 2.6.34
- libdrm 2.4.18 or newer (including enabled radeon driver support)
- xorg-server 1.7.5.901 or newer (1.7.6 is out)
- xf86-video-ati 6.13
If you give it a try, report the software versions and the kind of
connector cables you are using if you have any problems.
HTH again,
Dave W.
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