LinuxQuestions.org - ATI card and compositing support?

- Fedora (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/fedora-35/)

- - ATI card and compositing support? (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/fedora-35/ati-card-and-compositing-support-791115/)

Quote:

Originally Posted by adamk75 (Post 3883259)

fglrx will absolutely not work on Fedora 12 since the driver doesn't yet support Xorg xserver 1.7.* Hopefully this month or next months release will support it.

Maybe I missed it somewhere in this thread already, but what happens when you install the mesa-drivers-experimental package and try to use the open source drivers?

Adam

Quote:

Originally Posted by deesto (Post 3883873)

That's actually the first thing I tried, but I tried it again, just for fun. So after uninstalling the proprietary ATI driver, uninstalling the mesa-dri-drivers and mesa-dri-drivers-experimental packages, removing radeon.modeset=0 vga=346' from my grub kernel entry, and re-installing these two packages again, I am back to where I was in the beginning: no errors reported during boot, but no graphical desktop session. The boot process stops reporting after "Starting crond: [OK], Starting atd: [OK]". It just stops there. I can get into another console session and check the Xorg log (no errors) and system messages (no errors), and I can even start an X session, but that just produces a black screen, and again no X errors. 'lspci' shows the same VGA entry as before:

Code:

07:00.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc RV635 Audio device [Radeon HD 3600 Series]

Quote:

Originally Posted by adamk75 (Post 3883876)

Odd... So the screen goes black, but the machine is still responsive? Could you grab the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file and pastebin it? Have you checked to see if there are any updates to the radeon driver in F12? Or perhaps even tried a newer version from rawhide?

Adam

No offensive, but we're backtracking here. The problem is that ATI doesn't fully support KMS. We've already determined that. Deesto, until KMS is fully supported by ATI, you have to have the radeon.modeset=0 line if you want any video support at all.

As to the other problem, if the issue is what adamk said in his first post than, unfortunately, it confirms my previous statement: it is a driver issue. There is nothing you can do about it. File a bug report with ATI, describe the issue, try whatever they might suggest trying, but unfortunately, you'll probably just have to wait and hope. For now, you'll have to live with the open-source drivers, and without compositing (and for that matter, just about any other 3D) support.

Unfortunately, Linux users have to live with the cruel reality that they are a tiny slice of the computing community. And those of us within the community who want 3D support for effects, gaming, or whatever have to live with the reality that we are a tiny slice of that tiny slice of the computing community; Linux is still primarily a development and server OS.

What that means for us, the end users, is that graphics support S U C K S. There isn't anyway around it. Developers have little to no interest in providing the same support to the Linux community as they do to Windows users, for example, as we are such a tiny market. Sorry.

Alright, it's almost sounding to me like X is capable of running, but kdm/gdm are failing to launch, and 'startx' is failing to start up a window manager or desktop environment... Let's try this... Boot into runlevel 3 and then run 'xinit /usr/bin/gnome-session' (assuming /usr/bin/gnome-session exists, of course).

Does that start X and gnome?

Adam

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alex_Dc (Post 3884044)

The fglrx drivers do not support KMS, and never will. The open source 'radeon' driver however, does. So there is no need to use radeon.modeset=0 when using using the 'radeon' driver as he is now using.

Quote:

As to the other problem, if the issue is what adamk said in his first post than, unfortunately, it confirms my previous statement: it is a driver issue. There is nothing you can do about it. File a bug report with ATI, describe the issue, try whatever they might suggest trying, but unfortunately, you'll probably just have to wait and hope. For now, you'll have to live with the open-source drivers, and without compositing (and for that matter, just about any other 3D) support.

That is just not true. The open source drivers do support opengl compositing on his GPU with the mesa-drivers-experimental package in F12. Gaming will be more hit or miss, but new enough versions of the drivers will certainly run ut2004 and even doom3.

Now the question is: Why aren't the drivers working properly on his setup. I'm actually not convinced they don't work, based on my line of questioning. I hope to confirm that fact, though.

Adam

Quote:

Originally Posted by adamk75 (Post 3884071)

Again, I'm not trying to discourage you from helping, Adam, but please read through the initial posts before trying to troubleshoot the issue. Taken from the Arch Linux wiki:

Quote:

KMS enables native resolution in the framebuffer and allows for instant console (tty) switching. KMS also enables newer technologies (such as DRI2) which will help reduce artifacts and increase 3D performance, even kernel space power-saving.

KMS for ATI video cards requires the Xorg free video user space driver xf86-video-ati version 6.12.4 or later.

* With kernel version 2.6.31, KMS is available and is enabled by default.

* Since kernel version 2.6.32, KMS has been disabled by default and requires the software mentioned in the following section.
KMS mode for ATI is not officially supported at this time. DRI2-based ATI drivers remain experimental and the upstream developers are discouraging widespread distribution until stability is increased. After discussions with upstream developers the Arch Linux team has decided to disable KMS mode by default.

Ergo: KMS is not supported by ATI. You can't solve the problem of an unsupported feature by tweaking!

If the proprietary drivers won't work with Fedora 12 at this point, he's just going to have to live with with the open-source drivers, or switch back to his Nvidia card.

Quote:

Originally Posted by adamk75 (Post 3884078)

Ah my apologizes on that one. Still, the reason they aren't working is still the KMS issue. See my above post.

EDIT: Unless there have been some updates updates that I'm unaware of (the Arch wiki is usually pretty bleeding edge), the issue still stands.

EDIT 2: (I just can't seem to think ahead today!) Again, the open source drivers do work as long as he disables KMS. See:

Quote:

Originally Posted by deesto (Post 3881376)

Thanks a lot Alex. So I added 'radeon.modeset=0 vga=346' to my kernel line in grub.conf (I have dual widescreen 1680x1050 monitors, and I found a code '369' that was supposed to work at this resolution but didn't for me), and I see no error or warning lines in the X log. There are a bunch of info lines listing all possible modes, including:

Code:

(II) RADEON(0): Modeline "1680x1050"x59.9 119.00 1680 1728 1760 1840 1050 1053 1059 1080 +hsync -vsync (64.7 kHz)

On boot, my screens got swapped (not a big deal, and easy to fix once things are settings), and compositing is disabled as expected, but things seem otherwise fine to this point.

Thanks Alex, and sorry for backtracking. But even after restoring the radeon modeset directive (and the vga directive) in grub.conf, I'm getting the same (simulated) hang at boot. Xorg log still shows no errors, and the only warning after the "radeon" driver is loaded in the log is about color tiling not yet being supported.

I'm pretty frustrated at this point, and upset with myself for not doing more homework before ordering this card. I'd done a quick search and saw a few blog posts about having the card up and running in Fedora 12, all of which don't seem to make any sense at this point. And all to save my company $15 under the cost of a comparable nVidia card.

I really don't give a rats ass what the Arch Wiki says. KMS works on ATI cards. Perhaps his card has a particular quirk that KMS is not used to. If that's the case, I'd like to find out. Chances are there are updated drivers on Koji that fix this issue (if it is a driver issue, which I still doubt) since the primary developers of the open source driver commit directly to Fedora.

And, finally, even if he has to disable KMS for some reason, 3D should still work.

Adam

Quote:

Originally Posted by deesto (Post 3884103)

Please try my xinit suggestion.

Adam

Quote:

Originally Posted by adamk75 (Post 3884108)

Please try my xinit suggestion.

Yes: xinit gets me the same barebones gnome session as before.

Sorry guys: I didn't mean to cause any trouble,

OK. Well we're getting somewhere, at least. The driver is at least somewhat functional. We need to figure out why gnome isn't fully starting. Can you try 'xinit /usr/bin/gnome-terminal' and see if X starts up with a usable terminal? The, from within that terminal (assuming you get that far), try '/usr/bin/metacity --replace &' to see if the gnome window manager will then start up?

Adam

Quote:

Originally Posted by deesto (Post 3884103)

Ah, I didn't realize that. From your post, I thought that with the open source drivers X worked perfect minus your compositing support. Obviously the problem lies somewhere else, hopefully Adam will be able to help you in solving it.

Now to another point:

Quote:

Originally Posted by adamk75 (Post 3884105)

I really don't give a rats ass what the Arch Wiki says.

Seriously?! I try to quote a general reference to support my case and that's how you reply?! I'm not trying to say that the Arch wiki is the end all of information, or that I'm any more than generally knowledgeable on this, I'm just quoting a reference. I don't think I was rude in my posts, and if I was I apologize. But please: grow the hell up.

But that aside, good luck on this one.

Alright, my apologies for the remark about the Arch Wiki. The fact is that Fedora is considerably different from any other distribution. The kernel contains many bleeding edge features, including the latest and greatest code in KMS (at least at the time F12 was released.. A lot has changed since then). One of the selling points of F12 was the use of KMS by default on all radeon hardware and the ability to use 3D acceleration on r600/r700 GPUs. Obviously that doesn't mean it will work for everyone, but I just hadn't seen anything in the first two pages of this thread to suggest that this really was a driver issue.

So, to be fair, while I really don't care what the Arch Wiki says about KMS in this instance, I could have been more tactful about saying so :-)

Adam

Quote:

Originally Posted by adamk75 (Post 3884120)

I can indeed get to a gnome terminal after installing the gnome-terminal package (I am running KDE -- and xinit kdestart also gives me a gui terminal). The problem there seems to be that even though the terminal starts in both cases, I can't get to it to type anything: no mouse or keyboard activity is registered,

Please pastebin your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. I suspect the lack of keyboard and mouse input is due to this:

Code:

(WW) AllowEmptyInput is on, devices using drivers 'kbd', 'mouse' or 'vmmouse' will be disabled.

(WW) Disabling Mouse0

(WW) Disabling Keyboard0

Adam

Quote:

Originally Posted by adamk75 (Post 3884265)

Please pastebin your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. I suspect the lack of keyboard and mouse input is due to this:

Code:

(WW) AllowEmptyInput is on, devices using drivers 'kbd', 'mouse' or 'vmmouse' will be disabled.

(WW) Disabling Mouse0

(WW) Disabling Keyboard0

Hmmm ...
http://deesto.pastebin.com/7Fu07eYH

Screen0 and Mouse0 are definitely there ... interesting that only one screen is there too.