Testing radeon KMS on Ubuntu

[madman2k]

I dont have a solution, but I have the same problems using KMS on jaunty. Probably the xserver is too old or some other userspace component.
But radeon KMS is stilly quite immature - radeon-rewrite has still some major performance refressions and power management does not work at all..

[meden]

Very poor performances with RV350 and Jaunty

Hello,
I'm testing KMS packages under Jaunty (and yes, I read the disclaimer...) and I get very poor performances. With Compiz the system is unusable and with Metacity is quite slow (slowness is well noticeable on resizing and moving windows).

To make things work I had to install packages from radeon-kms PPA (of course) and upgrade xorg and mesa to Karmic; with only KMS packages or with radeon-kms and xorg-edgers packages I get console working, but xorg fails to start ("failed to allocate fb").

Everything works good with KMS live 0.14 (boot from usb).

How can I solve this issue? Thanks

[nanonyme]

This is because the kms-capable version of the -ati driver was forked off master a long time ago, before the power management was introduced, and it has not been synchronized since. Expect this to be fixed within the next weeks.

Including which in the KMS-capable version power management is afaik supposed to be written in kernel. (which leads to better power management than before due to the centralization of modesetting and acceleration features)

[GDJacobs]

Debian Unstable/Edgers

Any reports of success from Debian users? I ask this because I'm about at my wits end troubleshooting some annoying green screen corruption under KMS. A non-KMS kernel loads Xorg normally. The KMS kernel works cleanly when using modeset=0.

I have tried working around possibilities of versioning problems by using the Edgers KMS PPA as well as building from Jerome's git repository for mesa, xorg ati+radeon servers and libdrm as per http://jglisse.livejournal.com/1822.html. For the kernel, I have used both the patched KMS kernel on edgers and the 2.6.29 tree in Jerome's private repo.

When loading KMS I receive the version mismatch error reported by M?P?F here:

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17719

dmesg:

http://pastebin.com/f6e9dc289

X.org log:

http://pastebin.com/f2eb3bc19

lsmod:

http://pastebin.com/f27d0ec27

For what it's worth, v0.2 of the Edgers live CD works brilliantly, so I know my RS4xx IGP is at least nominally compatible. I'm guessing this is a userspace issue, but I just don't know what else to attack. Suggestions are very much appreciated.

[Kano]

I think they wait till suse gives em an new patched syslinux. The gfxboot patched syslinux is not supported by upstream. And it was definitely no U invention.

[highlandsun]

Well the usb-creator is only a script with a little gui - installing syslinux on a fat stick is a trivial task, wrote a script that works with debian live and U. But i would prefer when U would be using a more recent isolinux version + isohybird to create hybrid images you can directly put onto usb device.

Second that; I specifically pointed the Ubuntu folks at isolinux+isohybrid several months ago. They decided not to investigate because it didn't fit their plans for USB. Annoying... (They were only interested in ISO + USB if it allowed saving state in the unused space on the USB flash, and they already had a different approach to get there. They don't seem to care about providing a single ISO that works identically on CD and USB.)

[tormod]

(WW) RADEON(0): Option "ForceLowPowerMode" is not used
(WW) RADEON(0): Option "DynamicPM" is not used
(WW) RADEON(0): Option "ClockGating" is not used

Any ideas why this doesn't work?

This is because the kms-capable version of the -ati driver was forked off master a long time ago, before the power management was introduced, and it has not been synchronized since. Expect this to be fixed within the next weeks.

[forum1793]

Ah, and Wolfenstein exits with a SIG11. Haven't managed to get it to work with any version of the radeon driver, only with fglrx.

Not sure if this applies to you, but I used to get the same error with return to castle wolfenstein (RTCW) when the sound wasn't working. RTCW used OSS but my distro used alsa. It alway died with signal 11.

As root try this:

echo 'wolfsp.x86 0 0 direct' > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/oss

The start the game (probably as user) with : wolfsp.x86

[Kano]

Well the usb-creator is only a script with a little gui - installing syslinux on a fat stick is a trivial task, wrote a script that works with debian live and U. But i would prefer when U would be using a more recent isolinux version + isohybird to create hybrid images you can directly put onto usb device.

[tormod]

I tried to boot the live CD from a USB memory stick (copied using the isotostick shell script) and it failed with some complaint about squashfs version mismatch. Anyone else using it?

Sounds like you did not copy the live CD correctly and you have some conflicts with old live CD stuff on it.

1. Make sure you delete the old casper folder on the stick
2. Use usb-creator instead of whatever scripts