Re: Turning on direct rendering with an ATI card
On Wednesday 10 May 2006 18:39, John Schmidt wrote:
> I am trying to turn on direct rendering using the Xorg (from unstable,
> along with the linux-image-2.6.16-1-k7 from unstable) ATI driver with no
> success. The machine is at a remote location which makes the problem a bit
> tougher to debug.
>
> I have turned on direct rendering on several machines (my laptop with ATI
> card is one), so I have some experience, and things usually just work with
> little futzing around.
>
> The user has reported that glxinfo indicates that direct rendering is not
> turned on. lsmod shows that drm and agpgart modules are loaded along with
> the associated nvidia_agp module. Doing a grep on drm from dmesg shows
> that the R300 drm microcode is loaded.
>
> The Xorg.log indicates that the "ati" driver is used and that direct
> rendering is activated. The /dev/dri/card0 is probed and found. Every
> indication from the Xorg.log suggests that direct rendering is available,
> but glxinfo and glxgears -printfps suggest otherwise.
>
> I have the libdrm2 installed as well as the relevant xorg software,
> xlibmesa-dri, and libgl1-mesa-dri.
>
> I am a bit at a loss what is missing and where to look, since normally,
> things just work. I have restarted X and rebooted the machine just to be
> sure that kernel modules are loaded.
Unfortunately, older ati cards are a problem. My good old Mach64 is an
example. There are dri-trunk packages, including the drm kernel modules which
need be compiled against your kernel sources or headers. These packages
include their own, OLD xorg. (Xorg apparently needs be compiled with certain
security options to enable the (mach64) ati dri!).
These packages are no longer compatable with xorg on Sid. I am now off the ati
with little choice (I have not used Sids xorg exec until now--other package
components were fine.) I am now using an Geforce with Nvidia's driver which
handles its own DRI (will not show in glxinfo but glxgears will show the
higher frame rate). This card blows away the mach64 but I really did not want
to spend money on it. Progress.
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