AMD to Demo Fusion APUs at IFA Berlin, in September

[Laughing1]

http://news.softpedia.com/news/AMD-to-Demo-Fusion-APUs-at-IFA-Berlin-in-September-153495.shtml

Since Advanced Micro Devices keeps saying how it will soon unleash the Fusion platform, market watchers have been keeping an eye out for any news on the subject, and it seems that the company will finally make a demo of Fusion at IFA, the show set to occur in Berlin, Germany, between September 3 and 8.

So that means we are going to see a lot of development on the Gallium3D R600g driver soon because of the number of servers that will be using this APU.

[bridgman]

Just a minor point - the article suggests that this is the first Fusion demo ("will finally make a demo"), but the first two Fusion parts (Ontario and Llano) were already demonstrated at Computex back in early June :

http://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/06/02/amd-fusion-demo-video/

Alex (agd5f) is working on getting the open source driver stack working with the Bobcat-based part (Ontario) now.

[monraaf]

Alex (agd5f) is working on getting the open source driver stack working with the Bobcat-based part (Ontario) now.

Hmm okay. Then who is working on getting the open source driver stack working with the Evergreen parts? Because right now it's not really working.

[bridgman]

Hmm okay. Then who is working on getting the open source driver stack working with the Evergreen parts? Because right now it's not really working.

What problems are you seeing ?

[Wingfeather]

I've tried it on my 5850 (both the evergreen_accel branch of radeon and the latest mesa), and X (1.7.7-r1) does run with it. I get all right noises in the xorg log file and glxinfo, too, which is encouraging.

However, in terms of actual performance, I get:
- Corrupted cursor, always
- Full-screen corruption of essentially all desktop elements, in a way which change as I things move around. Really bad corruption, this is. Text is effectively unreadable wherever it is on the screen.
- Random crashes of both X and entire system
- Didn't try videos

I tried enlightenment E17 and KDE-4.4.5, both with openGL compositing and XRender. One thing I can say is that while corruption is severe with both, it is much worse with XRender.

A random thing is that once I'd run X with hardware acceleration and had all the corruption, switching back to software rendering didn't get rid of it. It needed a reboot to sort it out.

Is this what other people are getting?

[bridgman]

There are known GPU hangs when running 2D and 3D together - agd5f and Richard are both looking into those. AFAIK they also happen when using just 2D or just 3D but *much* less frequently. Probably would be a good idea to turn off compositing until the GPU hangs are figured out.

Not sure if the devs are seeing the same degree of corruption on their systems (at least I don't remember seeing or hearing about it); what are others seeing ?

[rohcQaH]

What problems are you seeing ?

I've written about my experience here (all of those were confirmed by others in the thread) and updated it today here.

the good news is that I had zero system freezes or X crashes today, but it's still far away from a working system.


I did ask which of those I should turn into detailed bug reports, but received no answer. If you claim not to know about those problems, the answer would be "all of them", right?

[Wingfeather]

Not much to add, but I've tried it today with xorg-server 1.8.2 and it seems to crash more than with 1.7.7. Unless I add the "RenderAccel" "off" option I can't even get X to start up with either KDE or E.

Once in, doing anything 3D at all (glxgears or turning on compositing) results in an immediate hang of X every time. Cursor still moves, but can't light the capslock or do anything.

[monraaf]

Evergreen problems

I was planning to do a detailed writeup, but I see others have beaten me to it One other thing that I'm noticing is that if I cold boot I see an almost immediate GPU lockup at the GDM login screen. It seems that I have to run fglrx first to set the GPU to a sane state before I can use any of the open source acceleration stuff.

[bridgman]

OK, that seems like a useful clue. Do you still get hangs eventually when running the open drivers after fglrx ?

Which GPU are you using ?

EDIT - I guess we should move this to the HD5000 open source driver thread for now