No xvideo and very slow 3D under Debian

[0x791e]

For Debian users:

After recently upgrading my xorg libraries to the ones in "unstable" (on a mostly "testing" system), I lost both xvideo and 3D support. That is, xvinfo shows the message "no adaptors present", while playing a simple 3D game such as ppracer shows abysmal frame rates of 3FPS. What did I do wrong? Is there some new library dependency that needs to be installed?

Some info about my system: linux 2.6.29-1-amd64, xserver-xorg-video-radeon 6.12.2-1, libdrm2 2.4.9-1, and lib*-mesa-* 7.4-2.

The actual use of the radeon driver is confirmed via grep /var/log/Xorg.0.log, that shows among other things:

(II) LoadModule: "radeon"

Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of my problem is the disappearance of xvideo support. If ever, this is the first time (counting back from the days of XFree86) that I have an X Window setup where the xvideo extension fails to work when using the *correct* free driver (both nv and radeon). So this may be a clue to what is wrong with my system.

[bridgman]

which GPU do you have ?

[0x791e]

which GPU do you have ?

Sorry, I thought it was obvious (it's my user name): I'm using the on-board video of my AMD690 [correction: not AMD780G] motherboard, an ATI Technologies Inc RS690 [Radeon X1200 Series]. Hardware accelerated 2D and 3D were working when I (temporarily) had some Ubuntu (!) mesa packages installed (I think it was version 7.2). XV was working (but not hardware 3D) using the previous default Debian mesa libs (7.0)

[bridgman]

Sounds like drm isn't initializing properly. There should be messages at the end of your dmesg output as well as in the x log.

[xaros]

Do you have the "firmware-linux" package installed? Debian moves the radeon microcode blobs there so you 'll need it for 3D accel.

[0x791e]

Thanks, bridgman and xaros.

The solution is installing the "firmware-linux" package. Before I installed it (and rebooted), I took a look at my dmesg output and saw a note about firmware not being loaded.

It appears, as xaros noted, that Debian post-Lenny put the firmware blobs in a separate package.

Video and 3D appears to be smoother than when I was running the X libraries available for Lenny (although I still have trouble playing glest RTS).