Re: AMD/ATI HD series PCI

[Patrick Baggett <baggett.patrick@gmail.com>]

Well, here's what I've found:

I used a HD 4650 with AGP, 1GB VRAM. It required a 6-pin l PCIe power connection, which clearly doesn't exist in a ZX6000, so I hacked together a separate 80W AC/DC adapter and tied the grounds to the built-in PSU. Not recommended for the faint of heart. Surprisingly, it works without burning out my entire system. :)

The EFI BIOS would natively start up the graphics card, much to my surprise. Linux ran on it and recognized it as an r600 family card. Unfortunately, the kernel is a bit borked and the initramfs-tools package is as well, so booting using newer kernels is a bit of a task. X started, but due the unpatched kernel (see debian mailing list about ia64 "futex") it just showed  cursor and some garbled background. I could move the cursor, etc. but X had no programs running. Console mode works though.

Both issues are fixed if you apply patches yourself, but I don't think they've been merged upstream and turned into packages in "testing" yet. For now though, it works well enough with the promise of GL 3.x support soon. Doom3 just got open sourced, right? ;)

EDIT: forwarded to mailing list

On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 11:14 AM, MG <marcogb@xs4all.nl> wrote:

On 17-4-2012 21:17, Patrick Baggett wrote:

> I'm using an HP ZX6000 workstation right now. Anyone had any
> luck getting an AMD/ATI HD series (2xxx, 3xxx, 4xxx) card
> working with DRI2?

Not me, I don't have any rx2600s (non-'workstation' zx6000
equivalent) anymore.  I did get non-accelerated output out of
a Radeon HD5450 in an rx2620 under several operating systems.
I also have a few AGP cards, including a FireGL X1-256 and a
Radeon HD4670, but the latter I haven't tested much (also be-
cause the mixed 'PCI-X and AGP' riser/card cage isn't --- or
not 'officially' --- supported in/by the rx2620, let alone
with the IA-32/x86 instructions lacking "Montecito" 9000
series processors).

I haven't bothered much with Linux as of late.  I should try
some more, soon, now that I have some time.

> If so, what machine? After updating Linux 2.6.x to Linux
> 3.2.x, my radeon 7000 series (on board) shows itself as having
> direct rendering, and this leaves me hopeful that DRM/DRI2 on

> ia64 is not just inherently broken.

Interesting, I didn't know that (about the Radeon 7000).

> I noticed that using an Nvidia 8400 GS caused the system to
> not POST -- it seems there might be some firmware issue, or
> perhaps just a simple power issue. I'm not sure. I'd like to
> get hardware accelerated GL 2.x with upgradability to 3.x when
> Mesa 8+ becomes available, basically.

That would be great, I'm all for that.  Before that, though, I'll
mostly continue to use OpenVMS and HP-UX (to a far lesser degree).

 - MG

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