How can I include the latest OSS Radeon Drivers in infinityOS?

[agd5f]

Which parts would depend on the kernel?

None of it depends on the kernel. The drivers will do the right thing depending on what kernel bits you are running.

[darkphoenix22]

Eh. My question is what exactly would I need to update to run the latest OSS Radeon drivers on an install based on Ubuntu Karmic.

How much of the kernel and how much of the X.org server would I need to update?

My priority is 100% binary compatibility with Ubuntu Karmic so I can use packages for it without any hassle or recompilation. I'm afraid if I update too much, I'll lose that compatibility.

Additionally, my user base is not very technically inclined, so it would not be a good idea to update the X.org server directly, as from understanding that would require going down to init 3 and the command line, which I can not under any circumstance ask my users to do.

I'm sorry if I sound terse, but I'm little confused about what code the latest Radeon drivers depend on.

[darkphoenix22]

To help you guys out, Ubuntu Karmic uses:

• xorg-server 1.6.4
• Linux kernel 2.6.31
• Mesa 7.6.0
• libdrm 2.4.18
• xorg-video-ati 6.12.99+git20090929 (though it has no 3D support for the HD 2000 series and upwards)

Please tell me if you need the versions of any other library.

[darkphoenix22]

Perhaps the guys making the Radeon drivers should set up a Launchpad project so users can ask the devs questions directly. Mailing lists are nice, but they are no where near good enough for end users.

[agd5f]

KMS is handled in the drm, so you need a kernel with kms support to use it. The rest (2D driver, 3D driver, libdrm, libdrm_radeon) don't have any specific kernel or xserver requirements.

[darkphoenix22]

I believe the kernel in Karmic has KMS support complied in.

Would the libraries I listed above be up to date enough for the latest Radeon driver?

I can't find any documentation on the X.org web site in terms of library requirements, nor can I find anything in the readme files. Looking though the configure script, I should be okay, but I would like official dev verification.

[darkphoenix22]

Hmm, well I installed 6.13 from source on my media center running infinityOS, which is currently based on karmic. KMS is not working and fails to initialize, and there appears to be no xv adapter.

OpenGL does work but it is VERY slow, about 1100 frames in glxgears.

[bridgman]

Can you pastebin xorg log and dmesg output ? If you're running on Karmic then updating the X driver should not affect KMS - Karmic turns it off by default and you probably should leave it off with that kernel driver (Lucid uses a newer kernel driver).

As agd5f said, the userspace driver should recognize whether the kernel driver has KMS enabled or not and "do the right thing". In this case it sounds like something else might have changed as well. Are you pretty sure that you only updated the X driver ?

[darkphoenix22]

I'm just waiting for things to stablize around Lucid before I switch. Plus I've fixed most of the bugs myself by upgrading most of the packages.

I'm giving up on this project. It tuns out I need at least Linux kernel 2.6.32 for KMS on my card. I tried upgrading Mesa to 7.7 and libdrm to 2.4.18, as well as upgrading the kernel to the current Lucid version, but I'm still not getting 3D acceleration or xv output. I'll post my logs to help you guys out, but I'll likely be redoing my install so I can't test this anymore.

3D acceleration with ATi cards is just going to have to wait until infinityOS 2.0. Thanks for your help though.

Here's my logs:

http://infinity-os.sourceforge.net/Xorg.0.log

http://infinity-os.sourceforge.net/glxinfo.txt

http://infinity-os.sourceforge.net/xvinfo.txt

http://infinity-os.sourceforge.net/dmesg.txt

[curaga]

Missing firmware.