anyone have good instructions for building radeon/radeonhd from git on debian?

[duffster]

I did git pulls for what I believe to be current repositories for both radeon and radeonhd drivers.

I followed the instructions (autogen.sh, make, make install) but I get no .ko files to load as modules and can't see how it is meant to work. I had the same problem with the official 1.3.0 release for radeonhd.

The packaged drivers for debian are pretty old and take a long time to get updated so I'd really prefer just to build my own.

I'm using 2.6.30 kernel and am not concerned about KMS. 3D would be nice, but just tear-free video will suffice. Power management and suspend/hibernate are important to me.

I assume the best plan is to use the latest git update, but I'm happy to be contradicted if there is an easier/more reliable release.

No doubt I'm just missing something really obvious.

I have tried reading various threads on building the drivers, but I everything changes so fast it's hard to know which are the uptodate instructions.

Can anyone provide simple instructions?

Nearly forgot - this is for r600 (3450), but I also have a 4350 that I can swap in if that's likely to give me better results.

[agd5f]

You might find this useful:

http://wiki.x.org/wiki/radeonBuildHowTo

[DanL]

This should work on Debian too:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonHD

For 3D, see: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1257453

[tormod]

Note that the DDX (radeon or radeonhd) does not include the kernel modules (.ko files). Just upgrade to a newer kernel for those. The DDX is basically /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/radeon_drv.so.

To update your Debian packages with the latest git, this is the canonical reference: http://wiki.debian.org/XTips

Then you will get real Debian packages and you don't have to worry about what to install where and overwriting/missing files.

This recipe is more or less what we use for updating the Ubuntu xorg-edgers repository. So the easiest for you is just to pick the source packages from https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa and debuild them on your Debian system.

[duffster]

Note that the DDX (radeon or radeonhd) does not include the kernel modules (.ko files). Just upgrade to a newer kernel for those. The DDX is basically /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/radeon_drv.so.

This is the main thing that is flummoxing me I think. A newer kernel could only be 2.6.31 at the moment, since 2.6.32 is not yet released.
I'm not sure I understand how this helps with getting the .ko files to load as modules? Does this mean that a newer kernel is a prerequisite for being able to run newer drivers than are available through debian apt (even in order to run the official 1.3.0 radeonhd driver)?

I've had a quick look at the XTips and PPA stuff, but it doesn't look very straightforward to me. Is the problem that we need lots of package updates for various X things, which is making it seem difficult when it isn't really? Or is it actually quite painful to get all this working?

[barkas]

This is the main thing that is flummoxing me I think. A newer kernel could only be 2.6.31 at the moment, since 2.6.32 is not yet released.
I'm not sure I understand how this helps with getting the .ko files to load as modules? Does this mean that a newer kernel is a prerequisite for being able to run newer drivers than are available through debian apt (even in order to run the official 1.3.0 radeonhd driver)?

I've had a quick look at the XTips and PPA stuff, but it doesn't look very straightforward to me. Is the problem that we need lots of package updates for various X things, which is making it seem difficult when it isn't really? Or is it actually quite painful to get all this working?

As far as I know, for r600 you need 2.6.32 (rc8 at the moment), mesa from git and radeon from git (6.12.99 it's called I believe).

[pingufunkybeat]

As far as I know, for r600 you need 2.6.32 (rc8 at the moment), mesa from git and radeon from git (6.12.99 it's called I believe).

This is for 3D and KMS.

For 2D/Xvideo/EXA, I /think/ that a 2.6.31 kernel will suffice, but I forgot.

[barkas]

This is for 3D and KMS.

For 2D/Xvideo/EXA, I /think/ that a 2.6.31 kernel will suffice, but I forgot.

That's right. You don't need any git stuff for 2D/xv/EXA.
Kernel 2.6.31, Mesa 7.6 (or even 7.5) and radeon 6.12.4 will do.

[tormod]

This is the main thing that is flummoxing me I think. A newer kernel could only be 2.6.31 at the moment, since 2.6.32 is not yet released.
I'm not sure I understand how this helps with getting the .ko files to load as modules? Does this mean that a newer kernel is a prerequisite for being able to run newer drivers than are available through debian apt (even in order to run the official 1.3.0 radeonhd driver)?

What do you mean getting .ko files to load? .ko files are kernel modules that are (most times) shipped with the kernel. They have nothing to do with radeon or radeonhd DDX or mesa. Well, they play together of course but usually no hard dependencies.

I've had a quick look at the XTips and PPA stuff, but it doesn't look very straightforward to me. Is the problem that we need lots of package updates for various X things, which is making it seem difficult when it isn't really? Or is it actually quite painful to get all this working?

If you just want to update the radeon DDX (xserver-xorg-video-ati source package in Debian), just:
0. sudo apt-get build-dep xserver-xorg-video-ati
1. dget url-to-dsc-file
2. dpkg-source -x dsc-file
3. cd xserver-xorg-video-ati-*
4. debuild -b -us -uc
5. sudo dpkg -i ../*.deb
and similarly for the mesa package.

PS. Sometimes it works to install the Ubuntu PPA binary packages in Debian testing, I haven't tried lately though.