[kudos] Radeon HD 4850 (r600) 2D/3D acceleration now completely supported by Debian packages
I would like to thank the Debian X Strike Force for its efforts --
especially including those of the workhorses named Julien Cristau and
Brice Goglin.
I bought a Radeon HD 4850 in the fall, and began experimenting with
acceleration for the R600 GPU used in that card. Debian had no packages
which would support such acceleration back in November and December, so
I had to learn how to make DEBs from upstream sources. I cheated by
using Debianized sources from the X Strike Force, and updating patches
(or creating new ones), and generally relying on the 'debian/rules' file
from the older Debian packages.
I was having to build 'libdrm', 'mesa', 'xf86-video-ati', 'xorg-server',
and kernels for myself, with the proper support enabled for r600 GPUS.
In December, I started using kernel mode setting as well, which required
a few more alterations to my custom kernel config.
It was a real learning experience, so I'm actually glad that Debian
didn't have all of the packages I needed for several months. I'm hoping
to use what I've learned to become more seriously involved with Debian,
including bug triage, bug fixes, and (eventually) applying to be a New
Maintainer. I see how thinly stretched many (most?) of the volunteer
Teams in Debian are, and wish I was already more able to contribute on
those levels.
At any rate, I was updating from kernel 2.6.32.2 to 2.6.32.{7,8}
yesterday and today, and preparing to try out 2.6.33-rc7. Before doing
that, I thought I should try out libdrm-2.4.17 and the new radeon
package in experimental to see if they are working. I assumed there
would be problems, and was going to build more recent versions of all of
the packages I mentioned above, but after testing the latest Debian
packages of ...
xserver-xorg-video-radeon
xserver-xorg-input-evdev
xserver-common
xserver-xorg-core
libdrm2
libdrm-radeon1
libgl1-mesa-dri
libgl1-mesa-glx
libglu1-mesa
... I can't find any reason to build my own DEBs any more! Your work is
much appreciated here.
My next step is to try out 2.6.33-rc7, which has IRQ support for r600.
If things go haywire, I may have to build my own packages after all --
but after last Fall at least I know how!
Thanks,
Dave W.
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