I have fedora 17 x86_64 installed and am trying to enable 3d acceleration My system has a ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650 i cant use the ati drivers because they only support up to 3.4x kernels and driver support for this card has been dropped by amd and gillium/mesa doesnt appear to support all of the features in this card yet this machine is about 2 and a half years old i cant believe amd dropped support for the 4x cards already. what are my options if any for enabling 3d support?

thanks,

Brian

Your options are:
1. Use the radeon driver despite the lack of features.
2. Use a distro with a kernel version 3.4 or lower and install the AMD legacy driver.
3. Buy new hardware.

Do you think the messa 9 drivers will offer support for this card? my concern with upgrading are the issues related to uefi bios systems

The current Mesa and Mesa 9 support your card, but not fully: bad power management and no hardware video decoding, for example. I can't use the radeon driver for my laptop with HD3200 video chip because of bad power saving, the laptop overheats.
IMHO, at the current state of the free driver it is mandatory for mobile devices do run the proprietary drivers. But , as you stated already, the AMD legacy driver doesn't support kernels newer than 3.4, so you are stuck with a distro that features kernel 3.4 or lower, running a bleeding edge distribution like fedora is not really an option. But you could use Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, the upcoming Debian 7 or Slackware 14.

Regarding new hardware, if you want to run Linux only UEFI is not a problem, Secure Boot may be a problem if you want to dual-boot with Windows 8, but from what I have seen yet it seems that the installed Windows 8 will continue to work if you disable Secure Boot. In general it seems that the install process for the bootloader is often not working, so that here manual works is necessary.

I found a solution that works for fedora. This may be able to be adapted for other distros. This assumes you have rpmfusion repository enabled

run the following in the order they are numbered. (all steps assume you are root if not become root before starting)

1. yum reinstall mesa-libGL
2. yum update kernel (if new kernel is installed reboot before continuing)
3. yum install akmod-catalyst-legacy
4. mv /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r)-radeon.img
dracut /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)
5. reboot
6. yum update
7. after updates are installed reboot one last time

This will enable full functionality of your card including hardware rendering and power management. It has also enabled my system to run 15-20 dagrees cooler.
output is below for confirmation
root@localhost bwest# glxinfo | grep "renderer string"
OpenGL renderer string: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650
bwest@localhost ~$ glxgears
8140 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1627.959 FPS
8141 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1628.086 FPS
8240 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1647.994 FPS
8247 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1649.342 FPS
8246 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1649.146 FPS
8262 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1652.296 FPS
8236 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1647.187 FPS
8261 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1652.084 FPS
8266 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1653.092 FPS
8269 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1653.711 FPS
8222 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1644.285 FPS
8260 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1651.963 FPS
8279 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1655.786 FPS
8267 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1653.229 FPS
8254 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1650.751 FPS
8217 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1643.397 FPS
8258 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1651.527 FPS
8228 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1645.479 FPS
8257 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1651.346 FPS
8251 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1650.174 FPS
8278 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1654.829 FPS
8268 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1653.590 FPS
8358 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1671.429 FPS

I hope this helps everyone with this issue.

-Brian

Thanks so much for this, this is the only solution I've ever found that's worked.
Running Fedora 17, kernel 3.6.10-2, ATI Mobility Radeon HD4650.

anytime