radeonhd driver and crossfire

[SethSLC]

Hello, I've been doing a lot of searching and have yet to come up with a solution to the following problem, basically I need to find a way to turn crossfire on on my card with the open source driver.

I've been using a VisionTek Radeon HD2600 X2 Quad (4 DVI) card for a while now and been trying to get it to run all 4 monitors under different linux systems. With the recent changes to the proprietary driver and them making this card legacy I can't use amdcccle any longer to turn CrossFire on on the card. Is there a way to do it through the open source radeonhd driver?

Right now I'm only able to get 2 out of the 4 DVI outputs to be seen. The newer versions of the ATI driver refuse to recognize the card. I finally got KDE 4.2 to work just the way I like it, but since its using a newer xorg than the legacy proprietary drivers allow I can't go back to an older version of the ATI driver that would see the card.

So basically in a nutshell is there a way to get crossfire turned on outside of the ATI driver aticonfig?

[Melcar]

I don't think Crossfire will be open sourced any time soon. It will be awesome if it is, but I have my doubts.

[bridgman]

Not sure I understand. Do you want Crossfire, or do you want to drive 4 monitors ? The two are kinda mutually exclusive. Crossfire lets you have the two GPUs work together on a single workload, so you're generally limited to 2 displays in Crossfire mode (or maybe just 1, not sure).

The HD2xxx series is not legacy, it's part of the 6xx family which is supported in Cat 9.4 and up.

[SethSLC]

Not sure I understand. Do you want Crossfire, or do you want to drive 4 monitors ? The two are kinda mutually exclusive. Crossfire lets you have the two GPUs work together on a single workload, so you're generally limited to 2 displays in Crossfire mode (or maybe just 1, not sure).

The HD2xxx series is not legacy, it's part of the 6xx family which is supported in Cat 9.4 and up.

The card is a HD2600 X2 Quad. It has 4 DVI outs on a single PCI-E board. Basically its 2 GPU's on a single board. The only time I've gotten the card to send signal out of all 4 DVI's is when crossfire is enabled. On Windows this isn't a problem, its easy enough to turn CrossFire on through Catalyst. However I primarily use Linux machines as my main box and the only way to turn CrossFire on is through the proprietary driver that I'm aware of.

The card is reporting as legacy since any driver prior to 9.3 I believe will see the card, however those drivers won't install given that I'm running xorg 7.4. Newer drivers will install, but they won't recognize the card.

As far as mutually exclusive, the only time I've gotten signal sending out of all 4 DVI ports is when I was able to turn on crossfire through aticonfig. Without that I've only got signal coming from 2 out of the 4 DVI ports.

lspci returns the following:

03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Device 958a
03:00.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc RV630/M76 audio device [Radeon HD 2600 Series]
04:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Device 958a
04:00.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc RV630/M76 audio device [Radeon HD 2600 Series]

[bridgman]

Maybe Crossfire is also enabling part of Multiview and giving you a misleading impression, but AFAIK what you want is Multiview not Crossfire.

Your card is not legacy; it's possible the ID was removed by mistake while the 3xx-5xx IDs were being removed, will check.

[SethSLC]

Thanks for checking that will help.

[bridgman]

Just to be clear, what exactly were you seeing with recent fglrx drivers ? It sounds like they installed and ran but you weren't able to turn on Crossfire - was the problem specifically with Crossfire or were you unable to use CCC-LE at all ?

[SethSLC]

9.3 and above will install fine, but they don't recognize the card. Running aticonfig will just return the line that there are no recognizable cards found.

Prior drivers to 9.3 won't install because of the xorg version I am running, apparently it's too new, and support for it wasn't written into drivers before 9.3.

[bridgman]

Your first post suggested that you did have older versions of the driver working (presumably with older xorg). Am I understanding that correctly ?

[SethSLC]

Yea at one point I was able to get older driver versions to work with this card, I believe 8.12 was the best. I was able to get all 4 DVI ports sending signal once enabling CrossFire. I was running KDE 3.5 and Xorg 7.2 or 7.3 can't remember.

Then I updated my system and moved to KDE 4.2 and the newer Xorg, at which point the 8.12 driver stopped working.

I've tried all the legacy drivers from current 9.5 back to 8.10 and only 9.3 - 9.5 will actually install. The rest fail due to Xorg, but drivers 9.3 - 9.5 don't recognize the card. It's kind of a catch 22.