AMD fglrx 8.42.3 - When will the baby mature ? - Experiences ..

[korpenkraxar]

I dunno...this has been a frustrating driver. To be honest, all I really want is to be able to suspend my laptop instead of shutting down when I'm done. I can do without the eye candy if I could just do that, you know what I mean?

Right on the money dude. Integrated graphics chips in laptops must be among ATi/AMD's most important targets for mass OEM sales and yet suspend/resume support has always been quite abysmal with fglrx!

I am stuck at kernel 2.6.20 and 3.35-5 on my Thinkpad Z61m with an X1400 because this combo sort of works (I may lose both 2D and 3D acceleration though). I will not upgrade fglrx until that hardware is reported to do suspending to ram correctly.

This is getting to the point where it is really embarrassing - to ATi, the OEMs selling their chips to end consumers, and to me personally. I always need to confirm that no happy MacBook ignoramuses are watching me as I turn the power off in shame.

I mean, even my four years old HP NX7000 laptop with a ATI 9200 Mobility that I donated to my sister can suspend/resume and do stutterless unblocky video, AIGLX and 3D, all at the same time using the FREE driver.

[psichod]

I've got Gutsy on a Dell E1505 with the core duo, X1400 card, 1680x1050 screen, 1G ram.

When I run this driver in dual-head mode, things are ugly...really ugly.

My experiences:
When everything is configured "properly" and I'm only using the laptop screen - it's screemin' fast with compiz and everything!
Once I enable dual-head and plug in the external monitor, all hell breaks loose and I can't even boot (dual white-screens of death and/or the weird artifacts under the mouse and at the bottom left of the screen).

After spending 4 hours trying to get it to work right, I finally removed everything and went back to the 8.37 drivers that come with Gutsy. Now I'm happily using dual-head with XGL + Compiz on both screens with no issues.

I dunno...this has been a frustrating driver. To be honest, all I really want is to be able to suspend my laptop instead of shutting down when I'm done. I can do without the eye candy if I could just do that, you know what I mean?

Dual head configuration works pretty well here up to the moment when I add Option "Composite" "True" and Option "AIGLX" "True". X just won't start with those two.

[Christian_L]

Hardware: Inspiron 6400 Laptop, Mobility Radeon X1400
Software: Fedora 7 with latest updates

Suspend/Hiberate is as broken as is was since 8.40.

Without Compiz enabled: XVideo does not produce total garbage anymore, but it is blocky and has strong tearing. The output of xvinfo looks OK, but I could not find any difference between XVideo extension and X11 mode in VLC player. OpenGL mode has tearing (worse than in 8.40), but setting "Vertical Refresh" in the ATI catalyst control panel to "Quality" removes the tearing in some movies and restricts it to a small bar at the top of the full screen in others. Overall, a small improvement...

Compiz installation was easy. Set "Composite" "Enable" and "AIGLX" "on" in xorg.conf, got everything from the kagesenshi-compiz repo that yumex could find there when searching for compiz or emerald (except debug/devel/unsupported stuff), started compiz via compiz-fusion icon, and right-clicked on the taskbar icon -> select windows decorator -> emerald. Effects seem to work, and I did not notice any corruptions or slowdowns with 2D applications. Had to again disable compiz though, because of the following severe bugs:

With Compiz enabled: Both OpenGL and XVideo mode were flickering horribly in both VLC and MPlayer. Same for glxgears and other 3D applications, regardless of the "Vertical Refresh" settings.

Conclusion: I'll stick with this version, but only because of the slight improvement of OpenGL video mode. Yes, 10 or 11 months ago, I was one of those shouting for AIGLX support. I was young and naive, and could not believe that one of the two biggest producers of graphic cards would almost take a year to produce just a buggy beta version, corrupting other things that already worked on their way. Never ever will I buy a laptop with an ATI/AMD card again.

Some new suggestions for naming this driver:
8.42 - "Congratulation madam, it's a ... well ... Horray, it breathes!" edition
8.42 - "Been tricked by bitter treats" edition
8.42 - "Not quite the answer to our Ultimate Questions" edition
and finally:
8.42 - "One poor monkey just isn't enough" edition

[hobophobe]

I run Debian Sid 32 bit with an X800 pro.

I had been holding new Xorg releases at bay for about 6 months because on 7.1 the driver would work fine, but with 7.2+ it would crash on startup.

With 8.42.3 I did a full apt-get dist-upgrade and then used the Kanotix script to install the driver. And then it worked (with Xorg7.3/server1.4) After using it for a bit I logged out of gdm and it crashed then. The driver loading once is only slightly better than never.

To the point: I uninstalled all Xorg and reinstalled (except the Xorg package is kept at 7.2) and somehow it just works now. I haven't upgraded the Xorg package itself to see if that matters, but I suspect it doesn't. Some other problem must have been solved by uninstalling/reinstalling.

Other than that is compositing. I'm pretty much resigned to wait for AMD to include the GLX extension 'texture from pixmap' before I'll use compiz, Avant Window Navigator, etc. I'm actually surprised they didn't include that in 8.42.3

A rudimentary (ie, working, but not optimized) implementation should have been included in 8.42.3. I'd prefer that to its complete absence. So hopefully 8.43.x will include at least a simple, slow GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap if not an optimized one.

[psichod]

Hardware:
8.42 - "Not quite the answer to our Ultimate Questions" edition
and finally:

Fourty two ?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

Brilliant.

[PCTIMES]

Hi,

This is my first post as this is my first install of a linux distro.

First thing first here's my config:

Core 2 duo
ATI x1600 pro
Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy
Dual screen

When I first installed Gutsy I had to unplug one of my screens cause it was making my system crash all the time. At that time I was using the open source ati drivers that came with Gutsy. I downloaded fglrx 8.42 and used the following walkthroug

I followed the guide line by line and it worked flawlessly for me... almost. I then installed compiz fusion and it did not work as I planned. No 3D at all. When I did compiz --replace in the console I got an error message telling me I had no white list. I then added that whitelist line in my compiz-management and it worked right away.

I get about 4750 FPS with glxgears. My only problem is the constant flickers of the screen when I stream videos off the Internet or while playing games.

My second screen worked after I installed fglrx 8.42 so Im running dual screens now.

Hope this helps!!!

[blessmurk]

So, since I've been waiting like crazy for this release, I'll post a short summary of my experiences in a new thread. Please reply with your own experiences if you feel like it.. Perhaps in the same form as below:
Hardware: ...
Software: ...
Experiences: Working/not working, better/worse than previous version, problems, etc. As concrete/detailed and non-ranting as possible (well, ranting must be tolerated when it comes to fglrx).

Hardware:
Lenovo Z61m laptop with an ATI X1400 Radeon mobility (128MB), Core Duo T2500 2GHz, 2GiB RAM.

Software:
Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10 x86 32bit, with all the latest updates applied (as of now).

I've been using fglrx 8.42.3 for a couple of hours, installed using standard "--buildpkg Ubuntu/gutsy", manually purging the old debs (8.40.4) before installing the new driver (just to be sure). I had no problems with the installation; libs, DRI-init and everything else worked.

So the driver is working, but it's still a disappointment. But I'll focus on the positive side of things first:

• Yup, it's now possible to start compiz, and AIGLX is present, at least.
  
  
• OpenGL performance (_without_ running compiz) is improved !
  
  
• Works better than 8.41.7, which I could not use on my hardware (that's OK, it wasn't officially supported on R500-class hardware, anyway).
  
  
• AIGLX support isn't perfect yet, but it's the first release supporting it, so I'm having hopes that it will be vastly improved in later releases.

That's about it.. Now for the negative stuff:

• No working XVideo (!). If I enable any overlay type, I get screen corruption in the upper left corner, consistently, it's a couple of lines, about 25% of the screen width. Video tears diagonally and flickers badly. Disabling video-overlay and opengl-overlay removes the corruption. "TexturedVideo" "true" the same, no help there.
  
  
• I can no longer use MPlayer with OpenGL output, it's remarkably slow, VSYNC settings have no effect on this (might be mplayer-specific problem, vlc and xine works fine w/ogl).
  
  
• 2D is dog slow without the XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps option. However, this is only when all video-overlay options are disabled. If any video-overlay is enabled, I don't need XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps for decent 2D speed, but the corruption makes that config unusable (*sigh*).
  
  
• Suspend is still not working, the symptoms are very much like those I had with 8.40.4. But this is rumoured to be because Ubuntu Gutsy uses a kernel with the new SLUB-allocator (replaced older SLAB-allocator), which apparently doesn't play well with fglrx on suspend (on my hardware, at least). Hoping this will get fixed in the next release..
  
• Compiz is definitely accelerated, but too laggy to be usable. Scrolling in gnome-terminal or Firefox is a real PITA. Enabling any kind of video-overlay makes compiz hard-crash on load. Trying to display any video using plain OpenGL output (Xine, vlc) is just a flickering mess, video frame always on-top, with compiz enabled. MPlayer w/gl-output freezes X, if compiz is enabled (SysRQ possible). Tweaking OpenGL VSYNC in AMD control panel does not help in this case. fgl_glxgears segfaults with compiz, glxgears works.
  
  
• I've observed the ancient/dreaded "[fglrx:firegl_lock] *ERROR* Process 7913 is using illegal context 0x00000005" error messages in the kernel log (but only once). Man, one would think they could get rid of these at some point ??
  
  
• Still need to use AlwaysRestartServer=true in gdm.conf for stability.
  
  
• Will have to complete yet another waiting cycle for 8.43, in hope that compiz and/or XVideo might some day work properly on this darned ATI-based lappy of mine, which is otherwise a very nice piece of hardware.

That's about it for now, happy waiting for 8.43.X . Bye.

Same Here,

1. Screen disttortion in lower left
2. xv no working
3. AIGLX is not working because of a mesa bug

[happycampers]

It seems alot of the problems appear to be coming from Ubuntu. That might be because of some wacky configuration it uses. It has nothing to do with Debian because I'm running Debian with it and it runs great.

Nope. Running OpenSUSE 10.2 here (kernel 2.6.18.8-0.7 on Dell E1505 / X1400). I have the screen corruption issue in 2D (around mouse cursor and in LR corner), the segmentation faults in dual-head mode, and overall sluggish performance with compositing + AIGLX enabled. I have not had any issues so far with video (except that with AIGLX / Compositing, the video flickers and overlaps any window elements that get in the way, such as menus). I am not having issues with Mesa, but I had to manually move and re-link libGL.so to get the fglrx version to run. 3D performance has improved dramatically and I don't think the screen corruption errors are a set-up issue as many have reported it, running Ubuntu, Gentoo, Suse, and Red Hat. Now that Ati seems to have 3D performance sorted out, I hope the next priority is bug fixing in 2D, with the screen corruption issue at the top. Note: in searching through forums and looking at bug reports, I noticed that this issue has been around in one form or another for the past several releases (at least since 8.37, judging by Bugzilla), which would make sense, if AMD has focused on rewriting the OpenGL engine and left the X / 2D bits pretty much alone.

[happycampers]

Screen Corruption :-(

I thought the screen corruption in the corner / around cursor issue was livable, but today it just kept coming back and coming back (I had IntelliJ open with two projects, KDESVN, Konquerer and Amarok). I've tried all of the server flag "solutions" posted here and all have been red herrings. I'm pretty sure I had my installation right, as I didn't experience any of the OpenGL issues others are complaining about, and AIGLX ran fine, albeit a little slow. I need this computer for work, so reverting to 8.36.5. Oh, well. Maybe next time...

[NobeyamaGP]

AMD Athlon 64 3000+
ATi Radeon 9600XT Pro
Kubuntu 7.10

I installed the driver and everything was working great the first day.

Then, a few days later, I decided to up my monitor's refresh rate up to 75Hz. I started getting odd garbled signal down in the lower right corner of the screen. Two bands of crap about half an inch wide and about the same distance apart, but they showed only rarely and a quick logout and login fixed it. Then I noticed i was getting some odd noise on certain websites, the main page of this forum was one of the worst, that looked like small blinking green or yellow pixels.

I decided that it might have something to do with Composite or AIGLX and since I don't have Compiz or Bryl installed anymore I turned these options off in my xorg.conf file. Saved, logged out, and restarted X, and every thing looked fine again. Then the next day it reappeared, so I decided to change the refresh rate back to 60Hz and see if that helped. I tried changing it back in CCC. The program acted like the refresh rate had changed, but the screen never blanked and the issues were still there, also I could restart CCC later and it still reported refresh at 75Hz. Tried Kubuntu's monitor settings, same deal as CCC. I looked up the Horiz. and Vert. rates off of the manufacturer's website and added them manually to xorg.conf. Restarted X and CCC said 60Hz again.

So basically, when I turn on the computer in the morning the monitor is set to 75Hz and I can't change it to anything else, however, a quick space added to xorg.conf, saved, removed again, and saved again, after restarting X again, monitor is automatically back at 60Hz and no noise on sites like this forum for the rest of the day. Very peculiar.

Otherwise, much better experience than previous versions of fglrx.