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ATI drivers

post #1 of 14
9/24/03 at 11:09am
Thread Starter 
After a billion attempts over the 8 months or so, I finally have the ATI drivers working. Whooo hooo, well almost. I have some observations, comments are most welcome.

1. Using the xfree86 ati driver instead of vesa, my glxgears went from 400-480 down to ~220. Using ATI's I get 1600-1900. Now the interesting thing about glxgears is that depending on where the window is, I get different figures. A nudge of 1 pixel may knock 300fps off the count!

2. I had to remove the frame buffer config from the kernel, before it became stable. It would appear the ATI drivers cause problems and would either a) never give me an alt-f1-6 console, or b) hang the system. Anyone have framebuffer and ATI drivers working together? Framebuffer was fine before, and I already miss my 200x48 console. sob sob.

3. My mouse doesn't work every time anymore. About 1 in 4 times it's dead. I never had this before installing ATI's driver. If I reboot, it comes back. What nonsense, I expect crap like this on doze not linux. There are no messages in dmesg or /var/log/messages to indicate a problem.

4. I was disappointed with the glxgears results. I'm sure I read on this forum that people were hitting 2200+ on similar machines.

The laptop is a 5660, P4 2.4MHz, 1G RAM using XFree86 4.3, 2.4.22 kernel.
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post #2 of 14
9/24/03 at 11:47am
Those numbers are very very low for the DRI drivers - are you sure you have AGP on in the kernel and are loading it. Are you sure that the dri drivers are getting loaded. You need to check the Xfree86.log file to make sure.
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post #3 of 14
9/24/03 at 11:53am
Thread Starter 
I guess not:

Quote:
[dri] radeon.o kernel module version is 1.1.1 but version 1.5.0 or newer is needed.
[dri] Disabling DRI.
It was the following up of this version business that made me retry the ATI drivers. Or was it? I can't remember now... Too many crashes and kernel compiles last night has turned my brain yokey. Though I never got to the bottom of the version issue.
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post #4 of 14
9/24/03 at 11:59am
i have radeonfb and ati drivers working together without problems.
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post #5 of 14
9/24/03 at 12:05pm
Ahh ok I think I see the problem. When you are working with the DRI drivers I strongly suggest downloading the latest binary package from the DRI site. Then in your kernel you want to enable DRM but do not compile the kernel module for the radeon (or compile it but make sure its a module). The DRI package will overwrite the kernel modules as well as installing new a groovy Xfree mods.

Thats about it. You should be GTG after this.
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post #6 of 14
9/24/03 at 12:11pm
Thread Starter 
So this DRI package means I should remove ATI's drivers? What kind of figures would I get out of the DRI package?
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post #7 of 14
9/24/03 at 12:18pm
Well that depends - those figures you posted, were they full screen glxgears or the small screen that initially comes up. As a rule the DRI drivers get maybe 50FPS slower than the DRI drivers. BUT the machine does not get as hot because they are not as CPU intensive.
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post #8 of 14
9/24/03 at 3:25pm
Thread Starter 
They were just the weeny window that comes up.

I'm very unimpressed with the stability of this machine now. It's worse than any windows version I've ever had to endure.
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post #9 of 14
9/24/03 at 5:34pm
Thread Starter 
The DRI option was a failure. It looks like their binaries are for XFree 4.4.
.
Quote:
(II) Module ati: vendor="The XFree86 Project"
compiled for 4.3.99.12, module version = 6.5.3
Module class: XFree86 Video Driver
ABI class: XFree86 Video Driver, version 0.7(EE) module ABI minor version (7) is newer than the server's version (6)
(II) UnloadModule: "ati"
(II) Unloading /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers/ati_drv.o
(EE) Failed to load module "ati" (module requirement mismatch, 0)
(II) LoadModule: "mouse"
(II) Loading /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/input/mouse_drv.o
(II) Module mouse: vendor="The XFree86 Project"
compiled for 4.3.0, module version = 1.0.0
Module class: XFree86 XInput Driver
ABI class: XFree86 XInput driver, version 0.4
(EE) No drivers available.
Yes, my 4.3 is too old. Great. I don't think I'll be bothering compiling 4.4. Gawd knows what using that will break.

ATI's offering was far too unstable. So that's been dumped. Back to no 3D or DRI for me. Sigh, didn't have any of this crap with nvidia...
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post #10 of 14
9/24/03 at 5:41pm
4.3 is the latest version of Xfree86 so thats not the problem . When you installed the DRI package (using the install script that came with it I hope) did you check and make sure that the kernel module was overwritten and also that the Xfree86 driver was overwritten. Also I hope that you did not install the DRI package while you were in X and that when you did it the kernel module was unloaded. It looks to me like all the files from the package did not install.

Oh yeah you uninstalled the ATI drivers before trying all this of course.
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post #11 of 14
9/24/03 at 7:10pm
Thread Starter 
Yes, I did the proper things. X won't start with the DRI drivers installed. The error listed isn't that rare looking at google. I know 4.3 is current, but look at the errors again: compiled for 4.3.99.12, module version = 6.5.3. Looks like a version problem to me. I tried the older versions, but they so recent, they have the same issue.

Now I'm back on my old setup, my machine hasn't done anything odd in the slightest. Unlike when having those ATI drivers running.

I can see why the kernel people really hate having tainted kernels, and why ATI are slated all the time. I think I'll give DRI and 3D the bird for now. I've lived without it on this machine up until now.
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post #12 of 14
9/24/03 at 9:06pm
Are you absolutely sure that the kernel drivers compiled correctly in the dri package.? The kernel module is called radeon and should be loaded before you startx. Your Xfree86 file should look like this

Section "Device"
Identifier "Radeon"
VendorName "ATI"
Driver "ati"
Option "AGPMode" "1"
EndSection

Or something similar.

Like I said It really looks to me like DRI did not install properly. I would really make sure of that first. I have never had a problem with the DRI drivers with a radeon card.
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post #13 of 14
9/24/03 at 10:09pm
Thread Starter 
It's definitely a version problem. The current DRI binaries want you to run a pre-release of XFree86 4.4. The mailing list has other people hitting this problem. Apparently the develops have merged some stuff from 4.4, and now people wanting to run the DRI offerings need to upgrade their X. XFree86 4.3 is too old for the current DRI.

I attempted to use the 4.3.99 linked to in one of their responses. I got a bit further in that DRI loaded, but X itself wouldn't run. To make matters worse, there are no errors or warning in the XFree86.0.log file. I guess that pretty much proves it's a version thing. The log message say dri and drm modules are compiled for 4.3.99.12.

It's a pity there's no archive of dri before they took this action.
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post #14 of 14
9/25/03 at 1:22am
Bummer
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