I have an IBM Thinkpad A22P with an ATI Rage Mobility M3 128, running Debian Sarge with Sid Xorg and KDE.

Just finished grinding through the painful Xorg 7.0 update (which seems to be completely undocumented), and everything's working now. Apparently none of the required libs is a dependency in apt-get, so I had to trip over each one to find out what was needed. I chanced this upgrade because Xorg 6.9 has a memory leak which fills swap after a day or so of hard work.

Direct rendering is working, because:
... and glxgears runs faster than when I remove libGL.so.

HOWEVER, glxgears isn't running what I'd call fast (4 seconds per revolution for the red gear), and my CPU is pegged. The whole idea of DRI is to offload work from the CPU, so I don't understand what it's doing?

I've gone through the troubleshooting here:
dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/DriTroubleshooting
and it seems to be out of date (or not for Debian), as it insists that I use the libGL in /usr/X11R6/lib, rather than the one in /usr/lib. But when I do that, direct rendering becomes "No". Also, the .deb package installs the library to /usr/lib, so apparently that's the right place. Another odd thing about the troubleshooting page is that glxinfo is supposed to have a line like:
libGL: OpenDriver: trying /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri/r128_dri.so.
... but no such animal, and yet it says dri "yes".

glxgears no longer prints out the FPS, so I don't know objectively how fast it is. It's been criticized as 'not being a benchmark'... but having something, is better than having nothing.

Any way to find out what my CPU is doing/ if I can speed up DRI?

The idea is I want ultimately to enable video capture, so I can record TV shows.

Download a demo of Unreal Tournament 2004 and benchmark scripts from reviewers. Then compare the results.

The utility glxgears only shows that 3D rendering is working with out any problems.

If the video capture is from ATI, then there is very, very little support for it. You can check out the gatos project. Also if you want TV out, then there is no support for it. For a notebook computer, I suggest nVidia graphics chips because nVidia supports dual output and TV out.

xorg version 7 is still experimental. Try 6.8 instead.

Meh, it doesn't untar
... and no instructions. Opening directly from ftp to Konq: "An error occurred while trying to open the archive". Tried Atari and FileFront servers.

Xorg v7.0 is running well, and is faster than 6.9. It's a PITA to install though, due to modularity and no indication what libs to install, but in general they're libX???.so.n, within the libx???n packages. Too early to know whether it has the memory leak. Who knows, maybe it's Gimp leaking into Xorg, for all I know, but Xorg v6.9 was swelling.

The ATI drivers in Xorg x7.0 are in fact the ones from the Gatos project, and hardware acceleration is set up automatically. Purported to be much faster, as completely rewritten. I need to learn how to set up capture. I believe the r128 driver recently got video out; it definitely got pageflip recently. Good to know that I shouldn't waste my time with the proprietary drivers, thanks.

The reason it won't untar is because it's not a tar file, it's a gzip file & can be decompressed by cd'ing to the directory it resides in & running :

gzip -d ./UT2004-LNX-Demo3334.run.gz

This will REPLACE the existing file so just to be safe make a backup copy of it first.

whups . . .

Whelp, pretty dismal.

When I run just the UT2004 demo, it comes up one frame at a time, like a slooow slide show. A frame every 7 seconds or so.I finally get to the main menu (Single Player, Join Game) after about 5 minutes.

So I ran the benchmark script here. It basically showed a picture of a gun pointed at a wood wall, and the wall alternated frames between focused and out-of-focus, every 10 seconds. I stopped the benchmark after an hour and a half, and got these pitiful results:
UT2004 Build UT2004_Build_[2004-02-10_03.01]
x86 Linux
GenuineIntel PentiumPro-class processor @ 998 MHz
Mesa DRI Rage 128 Mobility 20041026 AGP 2x

dm-rankin?spectatoronly=1?numbots=12?quickstart=1?attractcam=1 -benchmark -seconds=77 -ini=default.ini -exec=../Benchmark/Stuff/botmatchexec.txt

0.233701 / 0.476242 / inf fps rand[1056515237]
Score = 1.574043

As I understand it, UT is CPU-intensive, and admittedly my processor is a 1GHx P3, but should it be only one frame every 10 seconds? Should I be using Mesa in the first place?

Any advice appreciated.

Anyone have a similar experience?

OK, I see. Mesa is for 3D, and is not for standard video acceleration.

So why is my CPU pegged, with poor display performance, for video?

MESA 3D is software rendering not hardware rendering. Your processor is doing all the calculating that the GPU should have done, but the driver does not support hardware rendering.

If you type 'glxinfo | grep -i mesa' and it displays a few lines, then the driver is using MESA 3D.

If you can not get hardware rendering working, then you are out of luck.


BTW, I do know that Mandrake or Mandriva includes 3D hardware rendering for its built-in X Window drivers.

Thanks Electro.

I don't know what to do now. I tried following Gentoo's instructions by not depending on the kernel DRM driver, but it is not loading Xorg's driver; so the next step is to compile DRM, which requires removal of libdrm, which forces removal of essentially all GUI software, and I'm not going to do that.

With the kernel module I do get DRI, however for 3D it's using Mesa. I don't need 3D, and I should think 2D DRI is integral to Xorg, so record/playback of video should be fine, but I can't prove that.

glxinfo is just not loading r128_dri.so, like it says in Userspace setup. It says that if this is the case, "Make sure it's the one in /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL, or a link in /usr/lib to the one in /usr/X11R6/lib."

Well, I now find that I have /usr/lib/libGL.so, and that that comes from libgl1-mesa-glx. But the apt system will not let me remove libgl1-mesa-glx or libglu1-mesa without deinstalling virtually every GUI function on my machine. I do not know how to apt-get remove while ignoring dependencies. And further, there does not seem to be a libGL.so in any Xorg 7.0 package to take its place. So what is the system supposed to fall back on, and what is the DRI troubleshooting guide talking about?

I think it's clear that this is my last obstacle to getting 3D hardware acceleration working.

You clearly do not have functioning DRI, even though glxinfo says you do. This is most probably some library mismatch. Try running 'strace glxgears 2> glxgears.log' to see exactly what libs it's loading (or trying to load).

Thanks, but when I realized my libGL.so was from the Mesa project, and the Debian apt system would not let me deinstall it without taking out most of my other GUI stuff, I just renamed libGL.so and libGLU.so and rebooted. The theory is that these are actually replaced by Xorg's r128_dri, to give hardware 3D.

Now when I run run glxinfo, it still does not load the r128_dri driver, and it says, "direct rendering: No". However I can play movies 3/4 the size of my screen, and use only 30% CPU (1 GHz), so I am sure I'm getting 2D hardware acceleration. This is all I need, as the goal is video in the first place.

I've spent three whole days on this now, and I must move on. 3D is pretty busted. Just got the km driver (Gatos) compiled, and now am attempting AVView, but it's failing to compile.

I'm not familiar with apt but there should be an option to force it to ignore dependencies and just do what you tell it.

That sounds reasonable, so yeah, looks like your 2D acceleration is OK.

Thanks.

There is no --force, AFAICT, but over in the distro area leonscape solved it by suggesting I remove the three stuck packages at the same time!