kernel 2.6.31 & ati drivers

English Hardware
#1

I understand from a bit of googling that the fglrx drivers for radeon cards such as mine (Xpress 200M IGP, RS485) won’t work with the new kernel.

I’m unsure whether this is actually true though.

If it is, it seems that I’ll have to use the radeon driver for this chip, or stay on the older kernel. Unfortunately, while the free driver will do 2d acceleration, 3d acceleration is disabled for xpress 200M chipsets (at least on opensuse).

However, ubuntu since 8.10 allows 3d acceleration using radeon on these chips, apparently by using a newer/patched version of Mesa. I can’t find out much about how they managed this, I only know that whatever mesa is packed for opensuse has 3d turned off.

Has anyone tried fglrx on kernel 2.6.3* using this chipset? Even better, has anyone managed to get 3d working using the free driver?

Edit: I found this

There is support for 2D and 3D acceleration for the IGP chipsets in DRI and Mesa CVS. There is experimental 3D for Xpress 200M Northbridge integrated GPUs (june 2007).

from: http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/ATIRadeon?highlight=%28CategoryHardware%29#head-6cd1522552beb3e7ad5489538ba676bbce863c87

June 2007 - thats 2 1/2 years ago!

#2

On 10/22/2009 03:16 PM, weighty foe wrote:
>
> I understand from a bit of googling that the fglrx drivers for radeon
> cards such as mine (Xpress 200M IGP, RS485) won’t work with the new
> kernel.
>
> I’m unsure whether this is actually true though.
>
> If it is, it seems that I’ll have to use the radeon driver for this
> chip, or stay on the older kernel. Unfortunately, while the free driver
> will do 2d acceleration, 3d acceleration is disabled for xpress 200M
> chipsets (at least on opensuse).
>
> However, ubuntu since 8.10 allows 3d acceleration using radeon on these
> chips, apparently by using a newer/patched version of Mesa. I can’t
> find out much about how they managed this, I only know that whatever
> mesa is packed for opensuse has 3d turned off.
>
> Has anyone tried fglrx on kernel 2.6.3* using this chipset? Even
> better, has anyone managed to get 3d working using the free driver?
>
> Edit: I found this
>> There is support for 2D and 3D acceleration for the IGP chipsets in DRI
>> and Mesa CVS. There is experimental 3D for Xpress 200M Northbridge
>> integrated GPUs (june 2007).
> from: http://tinyurl.com/yfqhueh
>
> June 2007 - thats 2 1/2 years ago!
>
>

The new ATI Catalyst 9.10 driver supports kernel 2.6.31.

–
Christian

#3

Thats good, where did you find that? Did it also say that the driver still supports the chip I have? I had read that new ATI driver releases would not include support for it.

#4

Ok, I have looked around a lot on the ATI site.

Looks like the last catalyst driver version that includes support for Xpress chips is 9.3

The latest driver is currently 9.10, which doesn’t support that chip according to its release notes.

I’m going to assume that the old 9.3 driver won’t be updated to work with the new kernel.

When 11.2 comes out with the new kernel, I’ll just have to try it I guess :slight_smile:

#5

Your assumption is correct and even if someone would be able to get the kernel module compiling against 2.6.31, it won’t help.

Use the free driver “radeon” and hope for 3D acceleration, the above chipset has been quite problematic in the past.

#6

I’m hopeful - if ubuntu can do it (however well it may/may not work) then it can be done on openSuse as well.

I’m going to have a poke around 11.2 when it’s released & have a look at the versions of mesa/xorg which ship with it. Seems mesa 7.5 will do 3d, and 7.6 (git version?) is reasonably quick. I’d rather use radeon anyway - fglrx is good for 3d, but a pain in other respects…