OSS Radeon Drivers in Debian Testing are a letdown

[bridgman]

There are quite a few AGP cards in developer hands already (unless they were tossed in a moment of AGP-hate, which is always a risk ).

The issues tend to be chipset- and SBIOS-specific, unfortunately, not specific to the GPU or graphics card. If the AGP bus is not reliable, there are limits to what the driver itself can do. That's why most of the recommendations involve slowing down AGP bus speed or disabling use of the AGP features which are most likely to be unreliable.

Now that motherboard vendors have stopped supporting AGP mobos with driver and SBIOS updates, there's an argument that it's time to have the driver "assume the worst" for AGP hardware and default to lowest speed and disabling optimizations by default. The problem there is that on most systems the current defaults seem to run well, so changing the defaults would force most users to edit their xorg.conf files in order to get back current behaviour.

[Panix]

Why not just buy a bunch of refurbished computers with this hardware?

There are still older HP, Thinkpads, Dell Latitudes etc. etc. and they all have either Intel or ATI graphics. Many have ATI hardware. If X, xorg, OpenGL, etc. etc. (anything to do with video) is constantly changing and with the kernel, then it just stands to reason that you might need to integrate info and ideas with the various respective distribution developers who work on video issues and whenever the need arises to integrate within the kernel. I assume this is done already but from my reading, it seems a slow progression. I confess to ignorance and inexperience but people still use this older hardware. Maybe the driver should be integrated as one so all resources can be pooled together?

[monraaf]

IMHO with the limited manpower available, AMD paid devs should be focusing their development effort on the R600/R700/R800 driver and leave the obsolete cards and obsolete technologies such as AGP to the community.

[Panix]

IMHO with the limited manpower available, AMD paid devs should be focusing their development effort on the R600/R700/R800 driver and leave the obsolete cards and obsolete technologies such as AGP to the community.

I don't agree from a marketing standpoint, though. If you were moving to a newer laptop and the older one you couldn't get ati drivers optimized for 3D, you might not consider a newer machine with newer ati hardware just from prior experience. Btw, is it not possible to integrate the driver and have it detect the hardware and then pull in the related and required code from there?

If not, I think it is asking a lot to rely on the community. I've read so much conflicted info related to my 'obsolete' video card and only found one distro in which it seems to work (we're talking 3D here. I haven't had any 2D issues no matter the distro although it doesn't help if you wanted to run GoogleEarth, say).

[Hoodlum]

I don't agree from a marketing standpoint, though. If you were moving to a newer laptop and the older one you couldn't get ati drivers optimized for 3D, you might not consider a newer machine with newer ati hardware just from prior experience. Btw, is it not possible to integrate the driver and have it detect the hardware and then pull in the related and required code from there?

Surely it is worse from a marketing standpoint to buy a new card and find it's simply not supported because the devs are too busy working on radeon x800 drivers? Would this not detract from buying their hardware in future? even moreso?

I understand your frustration....but from a logical standpoint it will not be long before the R600/R700/R800s will be legacy also. Having good support for them sooner rather than later allows the devs to focus on the next line of hardware rather than dealing with R300-R500s and in 6 months, a years time dealing with the R600/R700/R800 which would by that time already be obselete and thus forever be behind the curve. At some point the priority has to shift to "lets actually make the new hardware work". If we start "now" and from this point onwards all hardware is supported well. in the next 5 years we will be in a *much* better place. If we keep looking back and spend the majority of effort on already legacy hardware in 5 years time we will still be as behind as we are now. This does not help.

[monraaf]

Well, as a Linux user whenever I buy hardware I always check on the Internet how well it's supported under Linux. Therefore I didn't have any ATI graphics before last year .

Right now I'm waiting to buy a HD 5750 or 5770 for use with the OSS driver. Currently it's not yet supported, but I'm patient. However every hour Alex or some other AMD dev spends debugging AGP problems or some obsolete cards is an hour he cannot not spent on the driver for the newer cards. So if only for my own selfish reasons I say stop wasting time debugging AGP problems

[Panix]

Well, if it was really the case and things are SOOOO bad that only one guy has to decide which card he's going to work on (I'm exaggerating), I'd have no choice but to get a Nvidia card and totally give up on my laptop. I'd just use Windows on it, then or sell it.

Why on earth would any Linux user buy an ATI card if they have to keep wondering/worrying whether support is going to be abandoned each time a newer generation card comes out? I know I sure wouldn't even consider it. Common sense would suggest to me to bite the bullet and get a Nvidia card.

[Kano]

I tested

ATI Technologies Inc RV630 PRO AGP [Radeon HD 2600 PRO AGP] [1002:9587]

via ssh today and it only worked with BusType PCI or PCIE override, thereforce i patched this:

diff --git a/src/radeon_driver.c b/src/radeon_driver.c
index 17253a7..4edd487 100644
--- a/src/radeon_driver.c
+++ b/src/radeon_driver.c
@@ -1964,7 +1964,7 @@ static Bool RADEONPreInitChipType(ScrnInfoPtr pScrn)
        (info->ChipFamily == CHIP_FAMILY_RS480))
        info->cardType = CARD_PCI;

-    if ((info->ChipFamily >= CHIP_FAMILY_R600) && info->IsIGP)
+    if (info->ChipFamily >= CHIP_FAMILY_R600)
        info->cardType = CARD_PCIE;

     /* not sure about gart table requirements */

Maybe it helps you too...

[agd5f]

That patch disables AGP on all r6xx+ hardware. If you are having AGP problems, use:
Option "BusType" "PCIE"
in the device section of your config.

[legume]

I tested

ATI Technologies Inc RV630 PRO AGP [Radeon HD 2600 PRO AGP] [1002:9587]

via ssh today and it only worked with BusType PCI or PCIE override, thereforce i patched this:

I use a RV670 AGP and on my nforce2 mobo had to set AGP Aperture to 256 in bios to get things working.

Using BusTypePCIE would cause additional problems with ums for me -

Would need to disable exa dfs to avoid corruption, DMAForXv to avoid high CPU and wouldn't be able to use power saving to avoid a hard lock when the clock turned back up.

I haven't actually tested these for a while - now mainly using kms which works well and game perf is better than ums. With ums (kms doesn't use it yet) I have to use module param no_wb=1 to avoid 3D rendering getting blocked and freezing.

Of course I guess it's not going to be the same for every AGP setup, but if you are advocating using PCIE for your users, these are worth knowing about.