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Old 04-12-2010, 09:35 PM   #1
Zorgoth
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ATI Mobility Radeon 4670 compatibility with linux?


I am debating between a Sony Vaio F and a Dell Studio XPS 16. The Studio XPS 16 is mostly better but the graphics card is ATI while I assume I can trust the Sony's nVidia card.

AMD says this card is supported by Catalyst. What I want to know is what kind of linux performance can I get? I will dual boot with Windows for most gaming, but I want compiz/glx-dock to run smoothly and buglessly and I want Wine to recognize the card and 3d linux games to play. WoW under Wine would be nice but not essential as I'll have Windows for games.
 
Old 04-13-2010, 02:10 AM   #2
rylan76
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IMO avoid ATI if you want to use Linux. Nvidia support is much better. I have used very old ATI cards with Linux though, things may have improved in the meantime. Still, my experience is that Nvidia's drivers are much more regularly updated, and I've never had any problems with using Nvidia cards and drivers under Linux.

Alternatively, see if you can maybe strike a deal, I have an understanding with my local computer shop that I can try out a card and see if it works, if not I can return and exchange. But then, they are quite positive toward Linux and open source experimentation.
 
Old 04-13-2010, 07:08 AM   #3
adamk75
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Frankly, I would avoid nvidia at all costs. I've used a few cards in the past, and always suffered from system lockups when doing anything 3D related with their proprietary drivers.

The HD4670 is supported by both catalyst and the open source drivers. compiz and the various docks will work quite well. Gaming with wine will, as always, depend on the game and on wine :-) You would probably have more luck with gaming with catalyst than with the open source drivers.

Adam
 
Old 11-26-2022, 10:44 PM   #4
dld2517
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How could I get this to work today

I know it’s been 14 years since the ATI Radeon HD 4670 card has come out. It is on my iMac (2009). I stopped getting OS X updates in 2020. I am trying to find out what is the newest Linux or BSD distro I can run. And should I try to do an Arch distribution? With some newer distros the RadeonDRM kernel module loads and as soon as it does the screen turns into a four pane mirrored and ghosted distorted mess.

I am trying to run the latest thing I can find that will give me a relatively stable system. A few years ago I started up with some live distributions and the display worked fine but with any modern one once that kernel mode driver loads the screen is shot.

I’d like to find out how to find out what distro to install with a userland ati driver.
 
Old 11-27-2022, 05:28 AM   #5
mrmazda
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FOSS graphics drivers are not distro specific. If any old graphics card works with one current distro, it should work the same with any other. Older graphics cards supported by the default X display driver tend to work well using it. That display driver is named modesetting, and is not packaged separately from the Xorg server package. Upstream's xf86-video-ati contains an optional older technology X display driver named radeon that may work better or worse or the same as the modesetting. Kernel drivers for GPUs are also not packaged separately. Each ships in a comprehensive kernel package or a kernel-module package. Mesa provides DRI drivers for 3D, but there is usually only one possible one to use for any given GPU.
Code:
# xdriinfo
Screen 0: r600
# pinxi -GSaz --vs	# pinxi is the devel version of inxi, which comes in new versions approximately monthly on average
pinxi 3.3.21-17 (2022-09-21)
System:
  Kernel: 5.19.0-2-amd64 arch: x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 11.3.0
    parameters: ro root=/dev/sda19 noresume mitigations=auto
  Desktop: Trinity v: R14.0.13 tk: Qt v: 3.5.0 info: kicker wm: Twin v: 3.0
    vt: 7 dm: 1: TDM 2: XDM Distro: Debian GNU/Linux bookworm/sid
Graphics:
  Device-1: AMD RV730 PRO [Radeon HD 4650] vendor: Micro-Star MSI
    driver: radeon v: kernel alternate: amdgpu arch: TeraScale
    process: TSMC 55-65nm built: 2005-13 pcie: gen: 1 speed: 2.5 GT/s
    lanes: 16 link-max: gen: 2 speed: 5 GT/s ports: active: DVI-I-1,HDMI-A-1
    empty: VGA-1 bus-ID: 01:00.0 chip-ID: 1002:9498 class-ID: 0300
    temp: 39.5 C
  Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 1.21.1.4 driver: X: loaded: modesetting
    alternate: fbdev,vesa dri: r600 gpu: radeon display-ID: :0 screens: 1
  Screen-1: 0 s-res: 3600x1200 s-dpi: 120 s-size: 762x254mm (30.00x10.00")
    s-diag: 803mm (31.62")
  Monitor-1: DVI-I-1 pos: primary,left model: NEC EA243WM serial: <filter>
    built: 2011 res: 1920x1200 hz: 60 dpi: 94 gamma: 1.2
    size: 519x324mm (20.43x12.76") diag: 612mm (24.1") ratio: 16:10 modes:
    max: 1920x1200 min: 640x480
  Monitor-2: HDMI-A-1 mapped: HDMI-1 pos: right model: Dell P2213
    serial: <filter> built: 2012 res: 1680x1050 hz: 60 dpi: 90 gamma: 1.2
    size: 473x296mm (18.62x11.65") diag: 558mm (22") ratio: 16:10 modes:
    max: 1680x1050 min: 720x400
  OpenGL: renderer: AMD RV730 (DRM 2.50.0 / 5.19.0-2-amd64 LLVM 14.0.6)
    v: 3.3 Mesa 22.2.0 compat-v: 3.0 direct render: Yes
Basically, any distro you pick will probably be fine for a properly functioning HD 4670.
 
Old 11-27-2022, 08:39 AM   #6
dld2517
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Thank you

Thank you for your reply. I think obviously I must be doing something wrong then. I am trying to install any Linux distro on my iMac 2009 model. I had booted to live CDs in the past but only wanted to do something different once OS X stopped providing updates. What I have seen in research is that newer kernels do not support mode setting that once allowed this card to function.

Anyway there must be something that I am doing wrong. I will have to write all that I have done up and ask for recommendations because I am at a point where I am completely frustrated. It doesn’t matter what distro I use or how I do it I get a real mess once the identified driver loads and I do not know how to shove a binary driver into a distribution and make my own iso from scratch with the tools that I have available. I feel like I’m missing one thing but I need to know what it is.


This system is 3.33 GHz, 12 G ram and it is still not a bad system at all.
 
Old 11-27-2022, 12:48 PM   #7
EdGr
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I can confirm that the Radeon HD 4670 works flawlessly on Slackware64-current.
Ed

Code:
ed@p6tse:~$ lspci | grep VGA
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RV730 XT [Radeon HD 4670]
 
Old 11-27-2022, 09:18 PM   #8
dld2517
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Thanks Ed

Thank you Ed. Nice website!

Do you have any tips that I should be aware of? I have been trying to get OpeBSD, and NetBSD installed and have run into problems each time. So far I have spent the past week working on this. I have not tried Slackware and I think I will give it a shot.

Any tips on drivers or other things I should install first or second? I ran a Slackware distro back in 1996. But have not run one since then.

Thanks,
Danny.
 
Old 11-27-2022, 09:59 PM   #9
EdGr
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Thanks!

All the necessary components (kernel driver/firmware/X11/Mesa) are included in Slackware64-current. You don't need to install anything else. As mrmazda said, this should be true of any Linux distro.

I believe your difficulty may be that the AMD Radeon drivers are not included with BSD (nor will they ever be due to the license). You have to run Linux.

I don't have experience with Apple, but I understand that they "Think Different".

Good luck!
Ed
 
Old 11-28-2022, 04:40 AM   #10
dld2517
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Drivers

Well that is just the thing, the drivers. So far, my problem is twofold.
One, I do not want the kernel to autoprobe for my driver and load what it thinks is the right one. I want to run in a barebones mode so I can at least set up an environment to work in. So far I have been unable to do that outside of an OpenBSD boot.rd environment. I just cannot get the kernel to stop doing its thing for me. I have no way to disable the radeondrm.

On a regular linux distro that is modern, it is doing the same thing, autoloading some amdgpu which I don't want it to do. I basically want a plain prompt but I'm having problems knowing what parameters to give to grub to tell the kernel to cut out its shenanigans.

One thing that I had hoped to do, was to download some distro, who cares what, and slip in the correct AMD/ATI drivers that I downloaded from the net. I have those and I just want to throw them into a tree so that they are available when I am in the mounted install environment but that is proving another trick.

The only thing Applish about the whole mess is the fact that this computer has no BIOS, but uses UEFI for Firmware, yet it has no secure boot through a TPM module like the current line. So I can boot to whatever I want as long as UEFI is able to talk to it. In one issue with OpenBSD, there is a place to use "boot -c" to configure the pre-boot kernel (in order to tell it 'disable radeondrm') but when I get to the UKI> prompt (to modify what loads into kernelspace, I get no keyboard support. Essentially the gotcha there is, if I had a normal PC I would enable Legacy mode in my BIOS and get a BIOS-controlled USB Keyboard.

(and that's where I pull my hair out and jump up and down and scream... "I ain't got no BIOS mister.")

So I got a pretty little speed demon that can run a microcode kernel and present it to me in millions of 3D-Accelerated color as long as it runs Mac OS 10.13.6.

Anything else... I'm just a bum.



Slackware here I come.
But first I"m going to stop of at ParrotOS Architect edition.
And I also have downloaded a FreeBSD 11.4 Edition to try. I used Wikipedia to look at the release timetable and tried to match the obsolescence factor of mac OS with the release schedule of FreeBSD.
 
Old 11-28-2022, 02:07 PM   #11
EdGr
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dld2517 View Post
With some newer distros the RadeonDRM kernel module loads and as soon as it does the screen turns into a four pane mirrored and ghosted distorted mess.
I am wondering whether the iMac lacks the flash chip that identifies the display (EDID). Try booting Linux with "vga=normal".

You need to let the kernel load the modules.
Ed
 
Old 11-29-2022, 06:19 AM   #12
dld2517
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Some good news

Well I have some good news to report. I found an old flash drive with CentOS on it. I have been able to run the installer by giving the following command to Grub:

linuxefi /images/pxeboot/vmlinuz radeon.modeset=0 rd.driver.blacklist=radeon

This got me an installer and I have installed to another flash drive. I am going to try another distro next like the FreeBSD and see if I can boot the same way or do something similar. One of my issues is I just had no idea what I was doing in the boot loader environment.


At one point playing with Grub I booted to an initrd image and was inside the ramdisk at an emergency shell so I was able to learn a bit more about that interim filesystem and kernel but just enough to experience dracut and not much more. I will follow up with other successes soon.
 
  


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