5000 series card questions

[Dave Witbrodt]

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.