Radeon: Direct Rendering and Acceleration not working

Langley · 04-09-2016, 04:33 PM

Hello,

On a fresh install of 64 bit 14.1, for some reason Direct Rendering and Acceleration is not working. Thus, I cannot rotate my monitor, and it will probably also be bad for gaming.

I have tried creating a /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-radeon.conf where I enable DRI3, TearFree and set AccelMethod to glamor, but it didn't help. You can see in the log file that it is not using them.

Xorg.0.log:
http://paste.ubuntu.com/15724197/

The card is an HD 7770. Please help, I have never had this problem before.

bassmadrigal · 04-09-2016, 10:08 PM

You could be using older firmware for your card, but that is hard to tell based on your Xorg.0.log output. Checking your dmesg for errors could help find additional issues. Also, it looks like the options specified in your 20-radeon.conf are not recognized.

Code:

[   410.660] (WW) RADEON(0): Direct rendering disabled
[   410.660] (II) RADEON(0): Acceleration disabled
[   410.660] (==) RADEON(0): DPMS enabled
[   410.660] (==) RADEON(0): Silken mouse enabled
[   410.660] (II) RADEON(0): RandR 1.2 enabled, ignore the following RandR disabled message.
[   410.661] (WW) RADEON(0): Option "DRI" is not used
[   410.661] (WW) RADEON(0): Option "TearFree" is not used
[   410.661] (WW) RADEON(0): Option "AccelMethod" is not used

Do you use any kernel append lines?

Langley · 04-10-2016, 04:04 PM

Thank you for your reply

I have no idea what to look for in dmesg, so here it is: http://paste.ubuntu.com/15748408/

Yes, those are the lines I referred to when I said it is not using the stuff I put in 20-radeon.conf.
I don't think I have any append lines. I followed the Beginner's Guide to switch to a generic kernel, if that's got anything to do with it. But it didn't work before that either anyways.

bassmadrigal · 04-11-2016, 11:25 AM

Can you post the output of Xorg.0.log without your /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-radeon.conf? I'm not seeing anything that sticks out with your dmesg output. Also, can you post the output of lspci -k | grep -iA3 vga ?

Langley · 04-11-2016, 05:45 PM

Xorg.0.log again: http://paste.ubuntu.com/15768856/

Code:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: AMD/ATI [Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.] Cape Verde XT [Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition]
	Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 0429
	Kernel driver in use: radeon
	Kernel modules: radeon

Nille_kungen · 04-12-2016, 07:17 AM

I would try Slackware current/14.2 instead if i was to use the open source driver.
In Slackware 14.1 it's better to use the proprietary driver.
Slackware 14.1 doesn't support DRI 3 or TearFree for radeon driver.
Check "man radeon" for supported options.
Remember that 14.1 was released 2013-11-04 that means it uses an old graphics stack for open source drivers.
The difference in current with the radeon driver is so huge that you should use current if you use the radeon driver.
In 14.1 there's no Dynamic Power Management which makes the driver so slow that it's barely usable and you got no Unified Video Decoder for media playback and no OpenGL 4.1 support and a lot of bugs.

mralk3 · 04-12-2016, 05:40 PM

I have a similar ATI graphics card on my older laptop. It didn't work in 14.1, so I upgraded to -current. No extra configuration was required. The open source radeon driver worked out of the box in Slackware -current.

Langley · 04-14-2016, 04:44 PM

I'm not too happy about running unfinished software, so I'll stay on 14.1 and I've managed to get it working with proprietary drivers, though I'm not too happy with those either since it's my experience they make my system more unstable. I'll see how it works in Slackware, thanks for your help

mralk3 · 04-14-2016, 05:07 PM

Its not "unfinished." Many other distributions use the same software versions in their major releases. Slackware-current is much better tested than the major releases of other distributions. Its like a broken record is playing and Linux users are really that uninformed about what -current is and how its developed. AND, for those who call. -current a rolling release development cycle, it's not! haha

edit: Try it out and you will be happy that your radeon driver actally works.

Langley · 04-14-2016, 05:10 PM

.... then why is it called the development branch that'll get released as stable when ready, and how can something have release candidates if it's not unfinished?

Richard Cranium · 04-14-2016, 09:49 PM

Pat V. has a really strict view of "stable".

I'm running -current right now on a testbed server and a laptop and haven't seen problems on either. The only reason why the machine that I'm using to type this isn't running -current is merely that I've pulled in a lot of stuff from slackbuilds as well as other stuff built via src2pkg and I don't feel like upgrading it all just yet.