Open Source Radeon Driver...3D?

[xero.03]

OK...so basically I want to try out AIGLX on my Fedora Core 5 machine (actually it will most likely be FC6 by the time I get the answer so wahtever :P ) but I have an ATI Radeon Mobility 9000 (M9 I beleive), and it's no longer supported by the ATI proprietary drivers. I searched the internet and found the open source "radeon" driver in FC doesn't allow 3D acceleration, but I've heard from some that there is an open source driver for Radeons that does allow 3D acceleration and is supported by AIGLX and XGL. I believe it's called DRI, DRM, soemthing like that but I haven't been able to find anything that pertains to FC5 and this driver all I find is mention of the built in radeon driver and it's 2d support then it trails off into a tutorial about installing "fglrx", which like I siad I can't use nor (from what I've heard) does it work with AIGLX. I'm by no means a Linux newb but I've been searching and haven't found anything...If you guys can help I would appreciate it.

[fissy]

Hi xero,

I've just installed FC6-pre on a laptop with a radeon X300M. To use AIGLX (and i presume compiz) all I had to do was install libXcomposite and compiz, then enable desktop effects through a gnome preferences menu that is added. Log out and in and everything works.

Things are slightly flaky on my system, like video doesn't work perfectly, and the screen flickers on some effects, but I think that is due to support for anything newer than a radeon 9700 being cutting edge as far as the open source linux drivers are concerned. I'm sure you won't have any problems, assuming you're happy to try out FC6 on a spare bit of disk.

You are right that you can't use ATI's fglrx driver, because it doesn't have code to support AIGLX. Fortunately, the 'radeon' driver that does support it is open source and included as part of fedora.

-fissy

[xero.03]

So the Open Source "radeon" driver IS 3D accelerated...thanks, I appreciate that greatly, I'm just gonna wait until the 11th, no reason to waste any discs when its so close to being released right?

[Firewing1]

Well, there's a fine line there... DRI = Direct Rendering Interface - It's not 3D, but it IS direct rendering which makes it much faster than the software (aka indirect) rendering.

So, it's not true 3D accelleration but you get near same performance, so who cares, right?

Firewing1

[xero.03]

So then how's DRI work? Does it just use optimized 2D calls or what? and if so IS there a 3D accelerated open source radeon driver? I mean if it works for AIGLX that's fine but I'd also like to install some games if I could, it's not important it'd just be nice.

PS - I just read on OSNews that FC6 has been pushed back to the 17th , ah well it's ok I guess I mean it wasn't unexpected after FC5 atleast the whole development cycle wasn't thrown outta whack this time, right?

PPS - In case you haven't noticed this is my first excursion with ATi and Linux, I'm an nVidia guy if you're wondering why my questions are so newb,

[Firewing1]

Here's a good page on DRI:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_...Infrastructure

As for the 3D things - Well, that's the idea. The direct rendering lets the normally-software 3D rendering occur much faster so IMHO you should still be able to play games.

Firewing1