ATI graphics acceleration [SOLVED]

[eman_resu]

I have a ATI Radeon Mobility M6 or something. It's a Dell Latitude C610. My card is not supported by the drivers on the "Howto for fglrx" thread. At least I don't think so. I'm trying to get games to work. I checked if I have direct rendering:

glxinfo | grep direct
direct rendering: No (If you want to find out why, try setting LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose)
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa GLX Indirect


I've searched Google for video in linux on a Latitude C610 and found this from an Ubuntu forum: "if im not mistaken, fglrx doesnt work with ati mobility 9000 m6 ly - so heres my xorg ( i have the same laptop as you ) just change module part and device part (the part with identifier: ati etc etc) and u should have some hardware acceleration. once u change your /etc/X11/xorg.conf type glxinfo | grep direct and see if it says direct rendering: yes.
if it says yes u should have decent 3d hardware acceleration, however, for much better perfomance you should install the dri files from the dri website. i messed up my laptop trying so im satisfied for now."

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=80723

I'm not sure if I should try this. It's from 2005 so I don't know if there's a better way of doing this now. Also, I don't know what he's talking about with dri, so any help with that would be appreciated, if I actually need to do that.

I guess I should post my xorg.conf?

# Xorg configuration created by pyxf86config

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
InputDevice "Synaptics" "CorePointer"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "us+inet"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "yes"
Option "SHMConfig" "on"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "radeon"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection


Thanks for any help.

[Hlingler]

It does certainly look like your chipset/card is not supported by the proprietary ATI driver. DRI="Direct Rendering Infrastructure" meaning 3D/hardware-accelerated graphical rendering protocol. See WikiPedia for the gory technical details. Also, open a terminal and type/read:
man ati
And:
man radeon
'man radeon' seems to suggest that it is (or might be):

SUPPORTED HARDWARE
       The radeon driver supports PCI and AGP video cards based on the following ATI chips
       R100        Radeon 7200
       RV100       Radeon 7000(VE), M6, RN50/ES1000

To find out exactly what chipset/card you have, open a terminal and become root user, then command:
lspci -v
Look for the group of entries flagged "VGA" and post results, just the relevant chipset/card identifier if you can find it, attach the whole output if you can't.

If you changed that 'Driver' line in your xorg.conf, I'm pretty sure that this is wrong. Driver "ati" is actually a driver "wrapper" for all ATI chipsets/cards that will auto-probe the hardware and load the appropriate 2D and 3D drivers and the driver kernel module. I'm not sure from looking at the DRI documentation whether or not your chipset/card is supported: http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/ATIRadeon. But you also must have xorg.conf set up correctly.

Try the following:
> In xorg.conf, replace "radeon" with "ati"
> Determine your available video RAM (VRAM):

cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log|grep -i ram

Or if that fails to reveal it:

cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log|grep -i memory

Post results. Your maximum screen resolution and color depth will be determined accordingly. You almost certainly need the 24 bpp color depth for games and other goodies, so you might need to reduce your default screen resolution - we'll see when we know how much VRAM is available.

> As an example, here's my xorg.conf for an ATI Rage Pro Turbo AGP 2X:

Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier     "single head configuration"
        Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
        InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
        InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
EndSection

Section "Files"
        ModulePath   "/usr/lib/xorg/modules"
        ModulePath   "/usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers"
        ModulePath   "/usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions"
        ModulePath   "/usr/lib/xorg/modules/fonts"
        ModulePath   "/usr/lib/xorg/modules/input"
        ModulePath   "/usr/lib/xorg/modules/linux"
        ModulePath   "/usr/lib/xorg/modules/multimedia"
EndSection

Section "Module"
        Load  "extmod"
        Load  "dbe"
        Load  "glx"
        Load  "freetype"
        Load  "type1"
        Load  "record"
        Load  "dri"
        Load  "int10"
        Load  "ddc"
        Load  "vbe"
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"
        Option      "AIGLX" "off"
        Option      "Xinerama" "0"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier  "Keyboard0"
        Driver      "kbd"
        Option      "XkbModel" "pc105"
        Option      "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier  "Mouse0"
        Driver      "mouse"
        Option      "Protocol" "auto"
        Option      "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier   "Monitor0"
        Option      "dpms"
EndSection

Section "Device"
        Identifier  "Videocard0"
        Driver      "ati"
        Option      "AGPMode" "2"
        Option      "AGPMem" "32768"
        Option      "HWCursor" "off"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Screen0"
        Device     "Videocard0"
        Monitor    "Monitor0"
        DefaultDepth     16
        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     16
                Modes    "832x624" "800x600" "720x400" "640x480" "640x400" "640x350"
        EndSubSection
        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     24
                Modes    "800x600"
        EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "DRI"
        Mode         0666
EndSection

BACK UP your xorg.conf, then add/append/correct the sections in red to yours. Note that some of the other entries are specific to my setup (esp. color depth) so don't try to duplicate them....

> After doing all the above, logout of the desktop and re-start the X-server with the changes (ALT-CTL-Backspace). Login and check things out. If Xorg won't start, get to a virtual terminal (ALT-CTL-F[1-6] any F1 through F6 will do) and restore the backed-up xorg.conf then restartx.

> Attach or pastebin the entire contents of /var/log/Xorg.0.log after all of the above.

> If you end up getting this working, install package driconf to get a minimal GUI to use to setup whatever available options that card supports.

V

[Hlingler]

Yeah, I just double-checked, and I'm even more certain that 'Driver "radeon" ' is wrong. From 'man ati':

DESCRIPTION
       ati  is  an Xorg wrapper driver for ATI video cards.  It autodetects whether your hardware has a Radeon, Rage 128, or Mach64 or earlier class
       of chipset, and loads the radeon(4), r128(4), or mach64 driver as appropriate.

SUPPORTED HARDWARE
       The ati driver supports Radeon, Rage 128, and Mach64 and earlier chipsets by loading those drivers.  See those manpages  for  specific  cards
       supported.

Package xorg-x11-drv-ati contains all the relevant 2D driver files:

[vince@localhost ~]$ rpm -ql xorg-x11-drv-ati
/usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/ati_drv.so
/usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/mach64_drv.so
/usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/r128_drv.so
/usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/radeon_drv.so
/usr/lib/xorg/modules/multimedia/theatre200_drv.so
/usr/lib/xorg/modules/multimedia/theatre_detect_drv.so
/usr/lib/xorg/modules/multimedia/theatre_drv.so
/usr/share/doc/xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.8.0
/usr/share/doc/xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.8.0/README.ati
/usr/share/doc/xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.8.0/README.r128
/usr/share/hwdata/videoaliases/ati.xinf
/usr/share/hwdata/videoaliases/r128.xinf
/usr/share/hwdata/videoaliases/radeon.xinf
/usr/share/man/man4/ati.4.gz
/usr/share/man/man4/r128.4.gz
/usr/share/man/man4/radeon.4.gz
[vince@localhost ~]$

There is no package 'xorg-x11-drv-radeon'. The 3D driver is part of package mesa-libGL:

[vince@localhost ~]$ rpm -ql mesa-libGL
/usr/lib/dri
/usr/lib/dri/i810_dri.so
/usr/lib/dri/i915_dri.so
/usr/lib/dri/i915tex_dri.so
/usr/lib/dri/i965_dri.so
/usr/lib/dri/mach64_dri.so
/usr/lib/dri/mga_dri.so
/usr/lib/dri/r128_dri.so
/usr/lib/dri/r200_dri.so
/usr/lib/dri/r300_dri.so
/usr/lib/dri/radeon_dri.so
/usr/lib/dri/savage_dri.so
/usr/lib/dri/tdfx_dri.so
/usr/lib/dri/unichrome_dri.so
/usr/lib/libGL.so.1
/usr/lib/libGL.so.1.2
[vince@localhost ~]$

And the kernel driver module comes with each kernel:

[vince@localhost ~]$ ls -lh /lib/modules/2.6.24.5-85.fc8/kernel/drivers/char/drm/
total 708K
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  82K 2008-04-19 13:15 drm.ko
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  23K 2008-04-19 13:15 i810.ko
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  29K 2008-04-19 13:15 i830.ko
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  29K 2008-04-19 13:15 i915.ko
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  65K 2008-04-19 13:15 mga.ko
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 187K 2008-04-19 13:15 nouveau.ko
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  45K 2008-04-19 13:15 r128.ko
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 116K 2008-04-19 13:15 radeon.ko
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  36K 2008-04-19 13:15 savage.ko
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  12K 2008-04-19 13:15 sis.ko
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7.6K 2008-04-19 13:15 tdfx.ko
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  42K 2008-04-19 13:15 via.ko
[vince@micron-pc-rb Sat May 10 22:10:39 ~]$

Try the above steps, if your chipset/card is supported by the 3D driver, it's just a matter of getting/tweaking the right settings. If not....

V

[eman_resu]

I just changed the xorg.conf file like you said and am about to restart. I was just about to type that terminal says the lspci command wasn't found but I logged into root to save the xorg.conf changes and:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M6 LY (p
rog-if 00 [VGA controller])
Subsystem: Dell Unknown device 00e3
Flags: bus master, VGA palette snoop, stepping, 66MHz, medium devsel, la
tency 32, IRQ 11
Memory at e0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=128M]
I/O ports at c000 [size=256]
Memory at fcff0000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
Capabilities: [58] AGP version 2.0
Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2
Kernel modules: radeonfb


Also:

cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log|grep -i ram
(**) RADEON(0): Depth 24, (--) framebuffer bpp 32
(--) RADEON(0): Linear framebuffer at 0x00000000e0000000
(II) RADEON(0): Detected total video RAM=16384K, accessible=65536K (PCI BAR=131072K)
(--) RADEON(0): Mapped VideoRAM: 16384 kByte (64 bit DDR SDRAM)
(II) RADEON(0): PLL parameters: rf=2700 rd=60 min=12000 max=35000; xclk=16600
(II) Loading sub module "ramdac"
(II) LoadModule: "ramdac"(II) Module already built-in
(II) Initializing built-in extension XINERAMA


After the restart I'll attempt to figure out what your second post means. Also, how to I get the code to show up in the little boxes in the posts?

And thanks for your help.

[Hlingler]

Originally Posted by eman_resu

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M6 LY (p
rog-if 00 [VGA controller])
Subsystem: Dell Unknown device 00e3
Flags: bus master, VGA palette snoop, stepping, 66MHz, medium devsel, la
tency 32, IRQ 11
Memory at e0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=128M]
I/O ports at c000 [size=256]
Memory at fcff0000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
Capabilities: [58] AGP version 2.0
Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2
Kernel modules: radeonfb

Now we know what chipset/card we're dealing with....

Originally Posted by eman_resu

cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log|grep -i ram
(**) RADEON(0): Depth 24, (--) framebuffer bpp 32
(--) RADEON(0): Linear framebuffer at 0x00000000e0000000
(II) RADEON(0): Detected total video RAM=16384K, accessible=65536K (PCI BAR=131072K)
(--) RADEON(0): Mapped VideoRAM: 16384 kByte (64 bit DDR SDRAM)
(II) RADEON(0): PLL parameters: rf=2700 rd=60 min=12000 max=35000; xclk=16600
(II) Loading sub module "ramdac"
(II) LoadModule: "ramdac"(II) Module already built-in
(II) Initializing built-in extension XINERAMA

At 16 MB VRAM, you're going to be pushing this old hardware to get decent graphical performance, but I was able to get a 1024x768 @ 16 bpp desktop with an even older ATI Rage Pro AIW AGP 2X with only 8 MB VRAM, so you should be able to get 24 bpp at the same resolution. Again, DRI depends on whther or not the 3D driver supports that card....

Originally Posted by eman_resu

After the restart I'll attempt to figure out what your second post means. Also, how to I get the code to show up in the little boxes in the posts?

Don't use the "Quick Post" box, use the "Quote" or "Reply Post" buttons to get the full VBulletin posting page with all the code/quote/url/font and other mark-up stuff.

[eman_resu]

Well, I'm in Windows now. I restarted and it won't go to the graphic login thing. It asks me my login and then password and then nothing. I can type stuff but I don't know what to type.

[Hlingler]

Originally Posted by eman_resu

Well, I'm in Windows now. I restarted and it won't go to the graphic login thing. It asks me my login and then password and then nothing. I can type stuff but I don't know what to type.

Login to the terminal as root user and restore the back-up xorg.conf file:

mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.screwed-up
mv <enter-path-to-back-up-xorg.conf-file> /etc/X11/xorg.conf

If you re-booted to Windows and/or otherwise can't get to a terminal, you'll have to boot into text-mode: stop the GRUB bootloader at the blue screen and press "e" to edit the boot parameters; use the arrow keys to move to the "kernel" line, go to the end, and add a space and then a 3, then press enter to boot to text-mode only. Then follow the above steps to restore the other xorg.conf. Then re-boot or restartx.

V

[eman_resu]

I guess I'm going to try to restore my backed up xorg.conf file. I was reading some beginners terminal command crap but I don't think I remember exactly how to do this. If I do I'll be surprised.

[eman_resu]

I'm back in linux. Do you want me to post the /var/log/Xorg.0.log thing? It's pretty long.

[Hlingler]

Originally Posted by eman_resu

I'm back in linux. Do you want me to post the /var/log/Xorg.0.log thing? It's pretty long.

No, use the "Reply Post" or "Reply Topic" and attach the file to the post using the "manage Attachments" button (page down to find it).

Sorry about the crash. I'll try to help you sort this out.

V

[eman_resu]

No need to apologize.

I had to rename var/log/Xorg.0.log to .conf because the manage attachments thing said it was an invalid file type.

Thanks again for all the help.

[Hlingler]

Everything looks really great, the card is detected properly, direct rendering is enabled and everything, it all looking fantastic, then here's the fatal error:

(II) RADEON(0): Output LVDS using initial mode 1400x1050
[...]
(EE) RADEON(0): Static buffer allocation failed.  Disabling DRI.
(EE) RADEON(0): At least 19800 kB of video memory needed at this resolution and depth.

You do not have enough VRAM to run the default resolution, so you need to reduce that. Try specifying 1280x800, it's available and should brong you down under 16 MB VRAM used. Is that good enough?

Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Screen0"
        Device     "Videocard0"
        Monitor    "Monitor0"
        DefaultDepth     24
        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     24
                Modes    "1280x800" "1152x864" "1280x768" "1280x720" "1024x768" ""800x600" ""640x480"
        EndSubSection
EndSection

[eman_resu]

Didn't work. After I tried what you typed it didn't work so I tried just have 1280x800, which didn't work, then tried getting rid of the 1280x800 part, thinking maybe that was too big, which also didn't work. I attached the log file, again renamed as a .conf file, and the xorg.conf file.

[Hlingler]

Originally Posted by eman_resu

Didn't work. After I tried what you typed it didn't work so I tried just have 1280x800, which didn't work, then tried getting rid of the 1280x800 part, thinking maybe that was too big, which also didn't work. I attached the log file, again renamed as a .conf file, and the xorg.conf file.

This Xorg.0.log is basically identical to the first one. Xorg and/or the driver(s) are not paying attention to your settings and continue to try to use the 1400x1050 resolution. Xorg is this way and it is extremely annoying: unlike the "other" OS, Xorg defaults to the highest available resolution and color depth, even if it results in a failed X-session. That is what is happening here.

I'm looking through 'man radeon' for the over-ride option/switch - I suggest that you do the same.

V

P.S. On the box I'm typing from, nvidia Riva/TNT2 I got 3D/DRI with proprietary driver at 1024x768 @ 24 bpp and 32 MB VRAM which is the max available for this hardware, but the monitor can do much better.... I had the same thing happen but simply edited the "modes" line and it works, don't know why yours isn't....

EDIT: I think I see part of the problem at least: no monitor is specified, so maybe it's taking matters into it's own hands.... Add a monitor section to xorg.conf to appease it:

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier   "Monitor0"
EndSection

[...]

Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Screen0"
        Device     "Videocard0"
        Monitor    "Monitor0"
        DefaultDepth     24
[...]

[Hlingler]

Instead of trying to manually edit/fix this stuff, try using the "Display Manager" GUI. I don't like it either as it can wreck a good xorg.conf quickly, but give it a shot: find "Display Manager" (aka system-config-display) in the menus, open it, and use it to set resolution to a lower value (suggest 1280x800).

V

EDIT: You can also use "Display Manager" to try to refine your monitor identification.

EDIT #2: If all else fails, try adding these options in xorg.conf 'Device' section:
Option "DDCMode" "off"
Force to use the modes queried from the connected monitor.
The default is off. Ignore the default, specify and force it off.

Option "IgnoreEDID" "true"
Do not use EDID data for mode validation, but DDC is still used for monitor detection. This is different from NoDDC option.
The default value is off. Reverse the default, force it off.