Radeon problem

zoran119 · 03-17-2008, 03:01 AM

Hi, I have radeon 9600. When I tried to setup dual monitor (http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...th-ati-606929/) it all worked out great apart from one thing. When DRI is enabled I get random system freezes, so I run with the DRI commented out in xorg.conf. This is what I get as a consequence:

Code:

$ glxgears
719 frames in 5.1 seconds = 141.638 FPS
680 frames in 5.1 seconds = 134.466 FPS
680 frames in 5.1 seconds = 134.361 FPS
680 frames in 5.1 seconds = 134.125 FPS
680 frames in 5.1 seconds = 134.528 FPS
680 frames in 5.1 seconds = 133.265 FPS

The driver specified in xorg.conf is 'radeon'. How do I reinstall this? Would reinstalling help to get DRI?

What are your thoughts?

Thanks

Simon Bridge · 03-17-2008, 08:07 AM

You ge DRI by uncommenting it in xorg.conf. reinstalling the radeon driver will not help.

You may run better with some options. See man radeon for ideas. You could also set the screen depth to 16.

Option "AGPFastWrite" "Off"

FraGGod · 03-17-2008, 08:46 AM

You can try out proprietary ATI driver from ati.amd.com, xorg module for it is called 'fglrx', but you'll have to download/install/compile it first, of course.

Simon Bridge · 03-17-2008, 10:05 AM

ya-argh! The proprietary driver is no better for the 9600s.
Anyway, best install it from distro repos.

The random freezing, only for dual head, suggests video memory or frame-buffer keeps getting exceeded. There are options to tweak these things. The BIOS may have switches to allocate system memory to screen... all assuming there is RAM to spare.

zoran119 · 03-18-2008, 02:36 AM

Screen depth change did not improve anything... There is no BIOS option to allocate memory to the screen... It's all a bit sad. No ATI again for me.

Thanks for the ideas.

Simon Bridge · 03-18-2008, 05:43 AM

Did you try changing the other options?

Last I heard, you were using:

Code:

Driver "radeon"
 Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"
 Option "AccelDFS"    "1"
 Option "AGPMode" "1"
 Option "AGPFastWrite" "1"
 Option "GARTSize" "64"
 Option "EnablePageFlip" "1"
 Option "ColorTiling" "1"

There are enabled options in there which could cause some instability.
Read the man page.

Change it to this:

Code:

Driver "radeon"
 VideoRam  "256"
 Option "DRI"               "On"
 Option "AccelMethod"       "XAA"
 Option "DMAForXv"          "Off"
 Option "AccelDFS"          "Off"
 # Option "AGPMode"           "4"
 Option "AGPFastWrite"      "Off" 
 Option "EnablePageFlip"    "Off"
 Option "ColorTiling"       "Off"

I'm explicitly switching off all the options which are known to have stability issues - particularly with AGP cards.

From the radeon(4) man page

Code:

Option "DMAForXv" "boolean"
Try or don’t try to use DMA for Xv image transfers. This will reduce CPU usage when playing big
videos like DVDs, but may cause instabilities. Default: on.

Option "AccelDFS" "boolean"
Use or don’t use accelerated EXA DownloadFromScreen hook when possible (only when Direct Rendering
is enabled, e.g.). Default: off with AGP due to issues with GPU->host transfers with some AGP
bridges, on otherwise.

Option "AGPFastWrite" "boolean"
Enable AGP fast writes. Enabling this is frequently the cause of instability. Used only when the
DRI is enabled. If you enable this option you will get *NO* support from developers.
The default is to leave it unchanged.

Option "EnablePageFlip" "boolean"
Enable page flipping for 3D acceleration. This will increase performance but not work correctly in
some rare cases, hence the default is off.

Option "ColorTiling" "boolean"
Frame buffer can be addressed either in linear or tiled mode. Tiled mode can provide significant
performance benefits with 3D applications, for 2D it shouldn’t matter much. Tiling will be disabled
if the virtual x resolution exceeds 2048 (3968 for R300 and above), if option UseFBDev is used, or
(if DRI is enabled) the drm module is too old.
If this option is enabled, a new dri driver is required for direct rendering too.
Color tiling will be automatically disabled in interlaced or doublescan screen modes.
The default value is on.

Try adding:
Option "AIGLX" "true"
... to your server layout section.

And.... for goodness sake read the manual.

psychicist · 03-18-2008, 01:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Simon Bridge

The random freezing, only for dual head, suggests video memory or frame-buffer keeps getting exceeded.

I think Simon's advice to zoran119 is pretty helpful but I haven't read that the lockups only occur for dual head configurations, they may just as well occur with only one head and DRI enabled. Maybe zoran119 can tell a little more about that?

As a side note, I also had lockups with a Radeon 9600 and the radeon driver on Slackware 12.0 but I upgraded Xorg 7.2 with Xorg 7.3 from slackware-current before the switch to glibc 2.7 was made and it's stable now. This may be because Xorg 7.2 was already a few months old when Slackware 12.0 was released and Xorg 7.3, which includes much improved support for some graphics cards, was released last August.

Also using the Ati fglrx driver should really be considered a last resort when all other things such as upgrading your Xorg drivers or even your entire X Windows subsystem don't work. I say so because in contrast with the proprietary Nvidia driver the proprietary Ati fglrx driver is in a far worse state in terms of stability and reliability.

At least it was that way in 2004 and I'm not sure it has improved much ever since. Unfortunately I don't have any recent Ati graphics card to try it on, since mine are all older Radeon 7000/9200 cards in AGP and PCI versions, which aren't supported by fglrx anymore.

zoran119 · 03-19-2008, 03:20 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by psychicist

I upgraded Xorg 7.2 with Xorg 7.3

Just out of interest, how do you do this (quick rundown)?

FraGGod · 03-19-2008, 07:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by psychicist

At least it was that way in 2004 and I'm not sure it has improved much ever since. Unfortunately I don't have any recent Ati graphics card to try it on, since mine are all older Radeon 7000/9200 cards in AGP and PCI versions, which aren't supported by fglrx anymore.

Well, recent cards, by contrast aren't supported by Xorg driver, so I always used fglrx, and it's made great progress in the last year - supports AIGLX, latest Xorg and gives me no trouble at all, compared to what it was just a year ago...

Code:

fraggod@malediction:~% glxgears
53083 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10616.579 FPS
44442 frames in 5.0 seconds = 8888.219 FPS
45510 frames in 5.0 seconds = 9101.973 FPS
45384 frames in 5.0 seconds = 9076.762 FPS
43925 frames in 5.0 seconds = 8784.810 FPS
49754 frames in 5.0 seconds = 9950.705 FPS
48191 frames in 5.0 seconds = 9638.138 FPS

Latest Xorg (7.3, 1.4.0.90-r3 server, gentoo). Dualscreen via driver (both screens form one desktop), not xinerama. ATI x1950pro.

psychicist · 03-19-2008, 07:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by zoran119

Just out of interest, how do you do this (quick rundown)?

I always rsync slackware-current, so I made a copy of the x package series at the time and just tried to upgrade Xorg using it. Since Xorg 7.2 was locking up anyway, it wasn't a really risky operation to do. So when you have the x package series, all you have to do is go into it and upgrade all packages and install new ones if they weren't already installed:

Code:

cd x
upgradepkg --reinstall --install-new *.tgz

The only thing you have to look out for when upgrading packages from a release (e.g. Slackware 12.0) with those from current, is newer dependencies that these may have picked up. Fortunately with the x package series from last October, that wasn't the case yet, so no dependency problem occurred.

To be clear, upgrading using (binary) packages from current is normally a very bad idea, but in this case it worked without problems. If you really want to be on the safe side you can also rebuild Xorg 7.3 from Slackware current sources, but I don't know if you can and/or want to do that. You may also be better off just installing Slackware current, which wouldn't be a problem in a non-production environment.

I still have the snapshot of the x packages series containing Xorg 7.3 from October last year and its size is about 78 MB in an uncompressed tar file. If you want it I can send it to you via ftp.

iiv · 03-19-2008, 10:53 AM

As for proprietary fglrx driver I would suggest not to use it, more than that, avoid ATI cards(see the link below, but it is old). Unfortunately I'm locked with ATI cards too: having 9600 in my laptop and PC and still xorg's ati driver lacks many dri features, you won't have acceleration for compiz, as "GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap is missing" you'll have to use inderect rendering for it.

http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/rms-ati-protest.html

DonnieP · 03-19-2008, 10:05 PM

I have similar experiences with ATI Radeon. The proprietary driver (I used the Feb 08 and Mar 08 versions) worked pretty well when it was working but gave constant random freezes of the X server that I could only resolve by powering down. The open source driver (that comes with Slackware-current) can't do DRI (on my X1600 card) but at least it's stable.