Radeon drivers in Trisquel 4.0
Hi all,
This morning, I booted up trisquel_4.0-BETA-20100519_amd64.iso on my laptop, an MSI GX710. It has an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2600 GPU. Everything seems to work great (sound, wireless, etc.)! However, I have a question about the graphics drivers. Should I be using the radeon or radeonhd driver? The package descriptions seemed to indicate the latter. If so, how would I load it? I installed the radeonhd package with synaptic, ran 'dpkg-reconfigure xorg-server', and restarted gdm, but the xorg log file seemed to indicate that it was still loading the radeon driver.
I found a wiki topic at Gentoo stating that the radeon driver has superseded the radeonhd driver. I also found a thread here about these drivers in general, but I thought it worth asking again for some more specific info about the current status of Free radeon drivers in Trisquel 4.0, especially regarding this card.
Thank you!
Jake
> I found a wiki topic at Gentoo stating that the radeon driver has
> superseded the radeonhd driver. I also found a thread here about
> these drivers in general, but I thought it worth asking again for
> some more specific info about the current status of Free radeon
> drivers in Trisquel 4.0, especially regarding this card.
The radeon Xorg driver should provide more features than the radeonhd
one, but that might depend on your model. I guess -I have no ati card to
try- to use the radeonhd one you need to install the
xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd package and put this into /etc/X11/xorg.conf
####################################################################
Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "radeonhd"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Configured Monitor"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Monitor "Configured Monitor"
Device "Configured Video Device"
EndSection
####################################################################
In any case, the kernel part of the driver -the radeon kernel module-
is required for most of the features provided by both the radeon and
the radeonhd Xorg drivers. That module contains a non-free binary blob,
so we used to remove the module. In Trisquel 4.0 we included a
deblobbed one, but since the blob is, AFAIK, a required piece, it's
possible that our module won't work as well as disabling it completely.
To disable it, run this commands and reboot:
echo blacklist radeon | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/radeon.conf
sudo update-initramfs -u
I'm pretty confident you won't get 3D support with none of the
combinations -with or without kernel module, radeon or radeonhd
userspace driver-, but disabling the kernel module might give you video
overlay (xv) support.
I am a translator!
At this point, radeon has already incorporated all the unique features of radeonhd, including support for the whole 600 and 700 series of GPUs.
Just wanted to write back to say Thank You (or Thank Gnu ;) -- this is exactly the information I was hoping for. Very complete.
Yours,
An update: I was able to export a 1366x768 display via the HDMI port (with audio) to my flat-screen tv this morning using the radeon driver -- very cool!
Thanks,
> An update: I was able to export a 1366x768 display via the HDMI port
> (with audio) to my flat-screen tv this morning using the radeon
> driver -- very cool!
Do you mean using the radeon kernel module + the Xorg radeon driver, or
just the latter?
We need to decide if the deblobbed kernel module is an improvement or
if it should better be disabled.
I am a translator!
On my computer, it has been an improvement. Full-screen videos in the 4.0 beta played smoothly whereas before they were laggy and poorly rendered.
I don't have an xorg.conf file in 4.0, but I was able to test the radeonhd driver on a USB install by copying the above code to /usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d/11-xorg.conf and restarting gdm. I was able to verify that the radeonhd driver was loaded by reading /var/log/Xorg.0.log. Come to find out, this almost disabled video playback on my test mkv file -- it would show a frame about every 2 seconds. So the radeon driver is much better -- only a little lag either in-frame or full-screen on this test file being played from my home file server.
I was unable to test removing the kernel module with the USB install -- when I ran update-initramfs and tried to reboot, I discovered that it would no longer boot. I would be willing to upgrade my current install on hard disk to the 4.0 beta, if this is desired from a testing standpoint.
I am a translator!
I have been testing 4.0 (amd-64) from the live cd on two Toshibas with Mobility Radeon HD 3400 Series and Mobility Radeon HD 4500. On the 3400 everything seems to work ok, it does in fact allow you to configure dualhead without downloading any aditional software (up to 3.5 you had to download "screen-utils" or similar). On the 4500 everything seems to work as well or as badly as with the standard xorg radeon driver -I tested as well with Ubuntu 10.04-, that is, it works well but the fan works at full speed all the time. There is some discussion on this issue on Ubuntu Launchpad (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/563156) and it is also mentioned on x.org web page under bugs for the "radeonhd" driver (not the "radeon" one: http://www.x.org/wiki/radeonhd#KnownBugs.26Limitations). It seems that installing fglrx driver solves the problem -it did in fact on this computer-, though perhaps some tweaking might help as well -I have not time currently for that-. Hope it helps.
