Radeon 4670 on Debian Squeeze (experience report)
Anton Ertl
work as desired (giving a resolution of 2560x1600) in Debian Lenny.
Recently I upgraded to Debian Squeeze, and now this card works nicely
(with a few twists, see below). The X server is 1.6.5 and the radeon
driver, which is used, is 6.12.3. I also tried the Live CDs of Fedora
12 (X Server 1.7.1, radeon driver 6.12.99) and Ubuntu 9.10alpha4 (X
server 1.6.3, radeon driver 6.12.99), and they also worked nicely.
None of these setups do 3D acceleration, but that's not important for
me.
At first the performance of the 4670 was very sluggish: I switched my
Window manager (twm) to show Window outlines when moving windows
because moving opaque windows was so slow; and displaying stuff in an
xterm was very jumpy. I fixed that by getting the non-free firmware
for the card (package firmware-linux from the non-free archive):-(.
Now the 2D performance is fine.
The 4670 consumes about 8W more when idle than the Radeon X1650Pro
that I used before. I guess that the driver does not clock the card
down when the card is idle.
I also tried to get 3D acceleration to work (just for the challenge).
First I installed libgl1-mesa-dri from unstable to get the file
r600_dri.so (Xorg.0.log said it was missing). Now glxgears does not
work at all (not even software rendering), reporting:
drmRadeonCmdBuffer: -22. Kernel failed to parse or rejected command stream. See dmesg for more info.
and dmesg says:
[ 776.952412] [drm] Loading RV730 CP Microcode
[ 776.952414] platform r600_cp.0: firmware: requesting radeon/RV730_cp.bin
[ 776.985137] [drm] Resetting GPU
[ 776.985191] [drm] writeback test succeeded in 1 usecs
Looks like I need a newer version of firmware-linux as well.
Followups set to alt.os.linux.debian
- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl Some things have to be seen to be believed
an...@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at Most things have to be believed to be seen
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html