openSUSE 11.4 ATI radeon driver problems

English Hardware
1

I recently migrated from 11.2 where I was using the fglrx drivers. I did a clean install of 11.4 and wanted to try out the open-source ATI drivers now that they are mature. I have been running into various problems with getting acceleration working. I have an ATI Radeon HD 4870 (R770).

Default install: Kernel mode setting is enabled, and the radeonhd driver is loaded and seems to render in software mode as you can see below.


$ LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose glxinfo |grep -i "\(render\|opengl\)"

direct rendering: No
OpenGL vendor string: Mesa Project
OpenGL renderer string: Software Rasterizer
OpenGL version string: 1.4 (2.1 Mesa 7.10)
OpenGL extensions:
*** WARNING: Direct Rendering is NOT enabled

I uninstalled the xorg-x11-driver-video-radeonhd package, hoping that the built-in Xorg radeon driver (not the radeonhd driver) would be used instead since it offers good 3D acceleration. Compare

Restarting X without the radeonhd driver available resulted in the radeon driver being used, but it was still using software rendering. I found the following error line in dmesg


*ERROR* radeon: ring test failed (scratch(0x8504)=0xCAFEDEAD)

Looking around online, it seemed that this is due to an issue in kernel mode setting. So I rebooted and turned off kernel mode setting (using the nomodeset kernel boot option). I used the following simple xorg.conf to use the radeon driver.


Section "Device"
        Identifier           "ATI"
        Driver               "radeon"
EndSection
Section "DRI"
        Mode         0666
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
        Identifier "InternalLCD"
        Option "DPMS"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Default Screen"
        Device "ATI"
        Monitor "InternalLCD"
        DefaultDepth 24
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth 24
                Modes "1920x1200"
        EndSubSection
EndSection

and the radeon acceleration kicked in. (Woohoo!)

I was pretty happy for a few minutes until I started getting these strange “crashes”. My X session randomly reset, taking me back to the login screen, and “dmesg |grep drm” showed the following lines


 2205.247696] [drm] Resetting GPU
 2205.786244] [drm] Setting GART location based on new memory map
 2205.786533] [drm] Loading RV770 CP Microcode
 2205.820657] [drm] Resetting GPU
 2205.820713] [drm] writeback test succeeded in 1 usecs

This keeps happening randomly. At some point it actually becomes a consistent crash (I un-minimize firefox with some tabs open, and the crash triggers). I don’t know where else to look for errors now. Any fixes or suggestions on how I should proceed with the radeon driver?

2

This is pretty good investigation and also fairly complex for problem solving. I recommend you write a bug report on this behaviour. There is guidance here for bug reports: openSUSE:Submitting bug reports - openSUSE . You can use your openSUSE forum username and password when logging on to bugzilla. There is a short time window after a new release when bug reports get more attention than normal, so now is a very good time to write such a report. In a month or two it may get a LOT less attention.

3

I will do that, but any advice on whether this should be reported as one bug or two?

  • There is the issue with Kernel Mode Setting: ERROR radeon: ring test failed (scratch(0x8504)=0xCAFEDEAD)
  • And then there is the issue with the radeon driver “crashing”.
4

If you find no similar bug (where searching the bugzilla site) then my recommendation is to write 2 bug reports. You can reference each other bug report if you think they might be related by simply replying to your own bug report.

My original bug report on the kernel/udev ( ? ) treatment of my Radeon HD3450 hardware was here: Access Denied

… and it was closed reference another bug report here Access Denied which is claimed as being similar.

5

For future reference, the bug reports are at:

6

Hi,

Ive recently converted to OpenSUSE from Slackware, and am hitting this bug as well, and see that the bug (675147) has been marked as fixed, but no info on how to obtain it. The system that I need to fix doesn’t have an internet connection (so I can’t use zypper), and I need to download the fix as either an .rpm or an upgrade install. Spending a couple hours combing the forums, wiki, etc, I haven’t come across info on how I might go about obtaining the fix I need, so I am posting here for help/info on this.

Cheers in advance.

7

I believe you are looking at the wrong bug (679147 instead of 679148). Both the ones I have listed are as yet unfixed.

The first bug is less severe in the sense that there is the workaround I mentioned in the bug report. The second one is the worse one, as I am currently stuck on running in software rendering mode.

8

Fair enough. Still, when the bug(s) are fixed, what’s the normal procedure for obtaining a fix w/o zypper? The next big release is slated for next November, and I’d like to get this fixed sooner than later. I write OpenGL apps and it’s really messing w/ my testing/debugging.

9

When I read that, it appears the assessment is there. Whether the assessment is correct is another story. 675147 was marked resolved by referencing another bug report, which is 67643.

In that bug report this was assessed as a liveCD problem that does not exist on a DVD install:

with a final note: