ATI R600/700 3D Support In Fedora 12

[AdamW]

Hi,

I've been running Fedora 12 on my HP 6735b laptop (RS780M/RS780MN [Radeon HD 3200 Graphics]) for a couple of days now and I've run into few problems. The only way to get the system into a usable state is to use nomodeset and the radeon driver. With this setup everything works, except suspend. When starting up from suspend, the screen stays blank. The system seems to start up ok, since it shuts down if I press the the power button.

Without nomodeset the machine crashes immediately when the fedora boot screen (plymouth?) is drawn.

So has anyone got suspend working with RS780M? What about KMS? Should it even work with my hardware?

We want KMS to work with all hardware; the idea is for UMS (the old way) to go away in future leaving KMS as the only path. So we definitely need reports of any case where KMS fails but UMS works. Please file a report, including the information from your post and also everything mentioned in:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_t..._Xorg_problems

thanks!

[agd5f]

Works fine on all my r6xx/r7xx cards including my rs780. I use it daily. KMS should work fine on all r1xx-r7xx radeons.

[Korri]

Hi,

I've been running Fedora 12 on my HP 6735b laptop (RS780M/RS780MN [Radeon HD 3200 Graphics]) for a couple of days now and I've run into few problems. The only way to get the system into a usable state is to use nomodeset and the radeon driver. With this setup everything works, except suspend. When starting up from suspend, the screen stays blank. The system seems to start up ok, since it shuts down if I press the the power button.

Without nomodeset the machine crashes immediately when the fedora boot screen (plymouth?) is drawn.

So has anyone got suspend working with RS780M? What about KMS? Should it even work with my hardware?

[AdamW]

Ideally, you're right. Practically, if the issue can't be fixed in an acceptable time scale, a quick blacklist that you can fix properly after release is a far better experience for the end user. End users are much happier with a "it at least works right for now and will work better later" than with a "it doesn't work right now but if you just suck it up and deal with it it'll work right later."

As I said, in the short term, yeah. In the long term, it can get ugly. (I spent hours maintaining Mandriva's gigantic private list of graphics card PCI IDs which matches cards to drivers, with specific workarounds for problematic cards...half the workarounds had been written eight years ago by people who'd left seven years ago and it was impossible to tell what the hell they were for...)

[elanthis]

Thanks, that's useful (and explains why I haven't hit it on regular testing of that system, I don't open that many tabs!)

We have a general policy of not spending too much time on implementing blacklists of hardware-specific workarounds and suchlike things in Fedora, instead spending the time working on just fixing the underlying problems; it can lead to a bit more pain in the short term but helps in the long term, you wind up with a clean code base with real fixes rather than a gigantic pile of workarounds you can't find the end of

Ideally, you're right. Practically, if the issue can't be fixed in an acceptable time scale, a quick blacklist that you can fix properly after release is a far better experience for the end user. End users are much happier with a "it at least works right for now and will work better later" than with a "it doesn't work right now but if you just suck it up and deal with it it'll work right later."

[AdamW]

They should be turned on for the hardware that needs it, was my point.

I posted about this on Phoronix some weeks back, right before I opened that bug report. Not a big deal. Thank you very much for looking at it, I appreciate it tons. The sooner I stop needing to reboot every few hours, the better.



Try opening a theming site in Firefox (gnome-look.org, for example), browse around looking at themes, and open them all in new tabs. After you get enough pages open with images simultaneously is when it starts happening for me. I tend to browse by reading through a few pages, opening all the interesting links with a middle-click, and then going through one by one after I finish the current page. I tend to end up with 40+ tabs at a time whenever I get into reading something serious, and if there's enough images (ads, screenshots, whatever), the corruption starts. Hope that helps reproduce it.

Thanks, that's useful (and explains why I haven't hit it on regular testing of that system, I don't open that many tabs!)

We have a general policy of not spending too much time on implementing blacklists of hardware-specific workarounds and suchlike things in Fedora, instead spending the time working on just fixing the underlying problems; it can lead to a bit more pain in the short term but helps in the long term, you wind up with a clean code base with real fixes rather than a gigantic pile of workarounds you can't find the end of

[elanthis]

Your comment is literally the first I've heard of this bug, but Matej is triaging it and Dave is responding to it, if they'd considered it sufficiently serious to consider as a release-critical issue they would have nominated it as such.

They should be turned on for the hardware that needs it, was my point.

I posted about this on Phoronix some weeks back, right before I opened that bug report. Not a big deal. Thank you very much for looking at it, I appreciate it tons. The sooner I stop needing to reboot every few hours, the better.

I happen to have a 4770 here so I'll see if I can reproduce on that, but honestly it's something we'd usually be happy with fixing as an update.

Try opening a theming site in Firefox (gnome-look.org, for example), browse around looking at themes, and open them all in new tabs. After you get enough pages open with images simultaneously is when it starts happening for me. I tend to browse by reading through a few pages, opening all the interesting links with a middle-click, and then going through one by one after I finish the current page. I tend to end up with 40+ tabs at a time whenever I get into reading something serious, and if there's enough images (ads, screenshots, whatever), the corruption starts. Hope that helps reproduce it.

[AdamW]

Is there any word on the screen corruption issues on r600/hd4770 on fedora 12? I was told that nodownloadfromscreen should be set to avoid it - if so, shouldn't the driver just enable that by default? It seems wrong to push a known broken driver to users in a stable distro release that requires manually setting an option that 99% of those users will never find out about. They'll (rightfully I
o) just assume Linux is crappy amd abandon it forever if the out of the box experience is that buggy... It would be better to just disable the r600 driver entirely if it can't automatically enable the option to fix the corruption.

My fedora bug report:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=524419

Your comment is literally the first I've heard of this bug, but Matej is triaging it and Dave is responding to it, if they'd considered it sufficiently serious to consider as a release-critical issue they would have nominated it as such. This looks like it's specific to particular chips (I don't think the other guy reporting in the bug has the same bug as you, since his hardware is a lot older).

I happen to have a 4770 here so I'll see if I can reproduce on that, but honestly it's something we'd usually be happy with fixing as an update. We can't just go setting workaround parameters universally; there's a reason they're not there by default, even though they help in a specific case it means they would hurt in others.

[elanthis]

Is there any word on the screen corruption issues on r600/hd4770 on fedora 12? I was told that nodownloadfromscreen should be set to avoid it - if so, shouldn't the driver just enable that by default? It seems wrong to push a known broken driver to users in a stable distro release that requires manually setting an option that 99% of those users will never find out about. They'll (rightfully I
o) just assume Linux is crappy amd abandon it forever if the out of the box experience is that buggy... It would be better to just disable the r600 driver entirely if it can't automatically enable the option to fix the corruption.

My fedora bug report:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=524419

[AdamW]

can someone post another link to this image (radeon-20091102-x86_64.iso) ? Thanks

It's obsolete, you don't need it any more. The current nightly - http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt...poses/desktop/ - should be fine.