Turning on direct rendering with an ATI card

[John Schmidt <jaschmidt@uofu.net>]

Hi,

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.

Thanks,

John Schmidt