hardware acceleration, radeon driver 6.13 (experimental)

[Jim McCloskey <mcclosk@ucsc.edu>]

Hello and congratulations to all developers on the release of 6.0.

I have a 5000-series Radeon card in my laptop:

02:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: ATI Technologies Inc Manhattan
	[Mobility Radeon HD 5000 Series] [1002:68e0] (prog-if 00 [VGA controller]) 
	Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:0413]
	Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16
	Memory at d0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
	Memory at cfee0000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=128K]
	I/O ports at 2000 [size=256]
	[virtual] Expansion ROM at cfe00000 [disabled] [size=128K]
	Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 3
	Capabilities: [58] Express Legacy Endpoint, MSI 00
	Capabilities: [a0] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
	Capabilities: [100] Vendor Specific Information: ID=0001 Rev=1 Len=010 <?>
	Kernel driver in use: radeon

For a number of reasons, I'm reluctant to use the closed-source drivers supplied
by ATI/AMD and so I've been using various versions of the radeon driver from the
Xorg project. That has been fine for almost every purpose, but I do not get
hardware acceleration or direct rendering, and so I can't really use applications
like Google Earth.

Hoping that more recent versions might provide better support, I've been using
the version of the driver (along with related packages) from the experimental
repository:

  server-xorg-video-radeon:
  Installed: 1:6.13.2-1
  Candidate: 1:6.13.2-1
  Version table:
  *** 1:6.13.2-1 0
          1 http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ experimental/main i386 Packages

  libdrm-radeon1:
  Installed: 2.4.23-1
  Candidate: 2.4.23-1
  Version table:
  *** 2.4.23-1 0
          1 http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ experimental/main i386 Packages
  
  libglu1-mesa:
  Installed: 7.9+repack-2
  Candidate: 7.9+repack-2
  Version table:
  *** 7.9+repack-2 0
          1 http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ experimental/main i386 Packages

Despite being `experimental' these packages have been completely dependable for
me. However:

[    16.586] (II) RADEON(0): Front buffer size: 4608K
[    16.586] (II) RADEON(0): VRAM usage limit set to 935539K
[    16.599] (==) RADEON(0): Backing store disabled
[    16.599] (WW) RADEON(0): Direct rendering disabled
[    16.599] (II) RADEON(0): Acceleration disabled

glxinfo | grep -i direct
direct rendering: Yes

glxinfo | grep -i opengl
OpenGL vendor string: Mesa Project
OpenGL renderer string: Software Rasterizer
OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 7.9
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.20
OpenGL extensions:

(I have linux-firmware, linux-firmware-free and linux-firmware-nonfree installed.
The kernel version is 2.6.36-trunk-686-bigmem.)

Does anyone know if version 6.13 *should* support hardware acceleration for this
chipset or if I simply have to be patient a little longer?  Perhaps there is some
configuration switch that I have wrong; I am not using an xorg.conf file; maybe
one is needed? Perhaps a newer kernel is needed?

In any case, I would be grateful for any advice or pointers.

Thank you all,

Jim