RADEON GPU accel not working Debian 6.0.1

[Blacksmith]

glorious days and I hope it will become a monument for eternity!

Yes they were, while Linux is excelent now one must remember in 1992 we were running windows 3.1 which wouid crash if given a dirty look. While the amount of apps availble on Linux was REALLY limited (the whole distributuion plus source code not even filling a single cdrom) it was absolutely bullet proof. The first time I ever ran linux was on a (I think it was a long time ago) a 386 with 8meg of ram. The distribution was Ygdrasil and had a demo mode, which would start the xserver, then called X386, and play some tunes, run a video of a girl with a hula hoop amongst other things. You couild see it trying to start apps and failing due to the very small amount or ram, but it did not crash absolutely amazing. I still think its one of the best computer demos I have every seen.

I still have the 2nd version of Linux I every had, basicly unusable now due to the major changes over the years to the ide driver.

Blacksmith

[Blacksmith]

You can use backports on Debian stable. Right now there are kernel 3.2.15, xorg-server 1.10.4,
drm 2.4.26, radeon 6.14.2 and mesa 7.10.3.

All you need to do is to, recompile or even backport some packages for you:

1. libdrm to 2.4.33 (or git master)
2. radeon to 6.14.4 (or git master)
3. mesa 8.0.2 (or git master)

That way your graphics stack can be mostly recent on Debian Squeeze.

Thank you for the reply, the problem though is with the kernel, the kms code not starting correctly, given that R600 KMS code for the Radeon 3870 apparently works so well it must be something in the install. This could only really be the micro code, as during the kernel startup very little of the system is active. The micro code used is not from the debian packaging system. which may be the problem. I do have the latest non-free firmware deb so I will install that and see what happens.

Blacksmith

[Blacksmith]

Sorry for the delay in the update..........

The problem was an incorrect directory structure in /lib/firmware, the radeon directory not being there, works great now. A couple of points might be worth mentioning, first this is definitely a problem I have had before and I simply forgot the remedy, one has done so much expirmenting over the years. The second point is the reason for the incorrect structure is I have not got an internet connection capable of installing any version of Linux, being still on dialup, this makes the installation particularly of an updated version of Debian difficult.

The test machine is working well, I will give it a little more work and I will consider upgrading my main machines to Debian testing, one of them anyway.

Thanks everyone for your help its been much apreciated,
Blacksmith

[Blacksmith]

Since I have got the GPU accelration working the display has been locking up very regularly. The cursor is still active but nothing can draw into the display and the keyboard does not work. One can ssh into the machine and reboot it no problems. A search on the net shows this is a known problem and it seems the kernel is the villian of the piece. With any kind of luck 3.4 will fix the problem. At least one work around was given (kernel command line that disabled a number of things) I have not treid it though. At this stage just set up an xorg.conf that uses fbdev, as this is a test machine this is a non issue.