Graphics acceleration options for old hardware (HD4000 era)

[imrazor]

I recently got a rude shock when I tried to install Debian Jessie 8.3 on an old Dell Precision M6400 laptop equipped with a Firepro M7740 (RV740, equivalent to a Mobility Radeon 4860). I had previously used this laptop with Debian 8.0 and Proxmox, but had wiped it a few months ago. When I reinstalled Debian and X, all I got was software rendering. Some research on the Debian wiki revealed that the Open Source driver had dropped all support for pre-7000 Radeon HD GPUs. Confusingly, the fglrx driver would support back to the HD 5000 series, but that still left me out in the cold.

So - why is the open source driver only supporting relatively new hardware? I thought Linux was supposed to be legacy friendly.

Do I have any *software* options? Would installing Debian 7 Wheezy get me hardware acceleration?

I do have some hardware options. The GPU in this model of laptop is replaceable, though it is a painful multi-hour process. When I first got the notebook, I replaced the stock Quadro FX 2700M with the Firepro. Looking at Nvidia's website, it *looks* like the 2700M still supported. However, I'm not sure the card still works. It appears that I could also install a Firepro M7820, which is based on an HD 5000 GPU. This *may* get me legacy fglrx support, though for how long is debatable, and they're expensive on eBay.

[bridgman]

Hold on, that doesn't sound right. Do you have the Debian wiki link handy ? It's the Catalyst driver that's dropping support for pre-GCN parts (previously it went back to 5xxx as you say), not the open source driver.

The open source radeon drivers support everything back to r100, and the r128/mach64 drivers go back even further. The only thing I remember being dropped was user-space modesetting code in the X driver (since it had been replaced by kernel modesetting), and UMS was "dropped for older hardware" only because it had never been implemented for newer hardware.

There should be no problem getting the open source drivers running on your hardware. It's probably something simple like not having the nonfree firmware repo enabled - look for a message like "microcode not found" in dmesg output. If you are missing microcode, you can look at...

https://wiki.debian.org/AtiHowTo#Firmware

... but just add the firmware-linux-nonfree package.

[imrazor]

Hold on, that doesn't sound right. Do you have the Debian wiki link handy ? It's the Catalyst driver that's dropping support for pre-GCN parts (previously it went back to 5xxx as you say), not the open source driver.

The open source radeon drivers support everything back to r100, and the r128/mach64 drivers go back even further. The only thing I remember being dropped was user-space modesetting code in the X driver (since it had been replaced by kernel modesetting), and UMS was "dropped for older hardware" only because it had never been implemented for newer hardware.

There should be no problem getting the open source drivers running on your hardware. It's probably something simple like not having the nonfree firmware repo enabled - look for a message like "microcode not found" in dmesg output. If you are missing microcode, you can look at...

https://wiki.debian.org/AtiHowTo#Firmware

... but just add the firmware-linux-nonfree package.

From the same Wiki page, under "Supported Devices:"

The radeon driver in Debian 8 "Jessie" supports R100 to Hawaii (Radeon 7000 - Radeon R9 290) GPUs. See the radeon(4) manual page and the radeon page on the X wiki for more information.

I think I see my mistake. It says Radeon 7000...I think I mistakenly inserted "HD". I had been reading so much about AMD dropping support for pre-GCN hardware I automatically jumped to that conclusion. I'll try installing the firmware and post my results.

[imrazor]

Nope, installing the non-free firmware did not help. Still no acceleration. How can I tell if the kernel module loaded? lsmod doesn't show radeon, r100, r300 or anything like that...

[bridgman]

Nope, installing the non-free firmware did not help. Still no acceleration. How can I tell if the kernel module loaded? lsmod doesn't show radeon, r100, r300 or anything like that...

Can you pastebin your dmesg output and xorg log then post the links here ?

BTW did you install Catalyst Linux at any point ? IIRC it blacklists the radeon kernel driver and over-writes the GL driver among other things.

[imrazor]

Can you pastebin your dmesg output and xorg log then post the links here ?

BTW did you install Catalyst Linux at any point ? IIRC it blacklists the radeon kernel driver and over-writes the GL driver among other things.

Yes I *did* try to install fglrx when it seemed the open source driver was MIA. I'm trying a reinstallation now - it's a fresh install, and I don't feel like rooting out fglrx. I'll post dmesg and xorg logs once I have a pristine install.

[bridgman]

Good plan

[imrazor]

It seems I was missing the critical step of installing the firmware. Cinnamon isn't crashing straight out of the gate, and the text is now well proportioned for my 1200p display. I thought the firmware was only necessary for performance issues, and that it could cause stability problems. Looks like its now critical to graphical functionality. Anyway, thanks for the help and educating me on which GPUs the OSS driver supports.

[imrazor]

EDIT: One last question. Any idea when Mesa will support OpenGL 4.0? May not matter since my GPU only supports OpenGL 3.3...

[bridgman]

Mesa is already at 4.1 for most recent GPUs:

www.mesamatrix.net

Your chip uses the r600 3D driver.

BTW you are correct that microcode (from the firmware package) is necessary for performance issues, but "performance issues" is a nice way of saying "software rendering" among other things (like video decode on the CPU). The microcode controls 3D acceleration on-chip, among other things.

The microcode did not cause stability problems, although when the drivers were new and unstable removing it could give the appearance of avoiding stability issues by disabling hardware acceleration (ie by disabling most of the driver functionality).