Testing radeon KMS on Ubuntu

[tormod]

I didn't set any options at all. I dunno why it didn't match UUIDs properly.

Yes, that is strange. Possibly a bug.

Which bug tracker? That iso is already 2 weeks old, not even sure if the bug is current any more.

Right, and with all the stuff happening now (kms remake in -ati master, kms kernel enabled by default in karmic, assorted 2.6.31 issues) it can be some days before we get to make a new CD iso. I had to resort to vesa last night

[pedrodh]

Hi! I'm sorry for my ignorance, but what does this KMS feature brings for the radeon cards? I assume this will make the open source drivers better yes? I've a X600 ( RV380 GPU I think ) and since ATI have ceased support for this and other cards with their proprietary driver this could bring some joy into my life, maybe there's still hope for this laptop :P. This feature applies to older GPUs like mine, correct?

[bridgman]

KMS on its own allows :

- faster and more reliable suspend/resume/VT-switch

- the ability to run the X server without root privileges (so less likelihood of wedging your system),

- a single graphics driver that is used everywhere. The pre-KMS environment has a variety of different drivers taking turns controlling the hardware, which frequently works well but sometimes doesn't -- suing a single driver for everything also means bootup can be smoother and kernel errors can display messages reliably

Equally important to you is that KMS is built on top of a common in-kernel memory manager for graphics (GEM/TTM), which is the pre-requisite for a number of other desireable features :

- DRI2 / Redirected Direct Rendering (flicker-free compositing of 3D windows)

- higher levels of GL support in the 3D drivers (allows apps/games run which could not run before, allows some already running games to take faster code paths)

- Gallium3D (think of it as a new, improved hardware driver model inside Mesa), which offers both higher potential performance and a framework capable of supporting other acceleration APIs including video decode

[pedrodh]

Thank you for the info. I hope this get done soon, I've had problems with resume in the past, and well, the current open-source driver lacks power when it comes to games. Good luck for the developers ( even though they might not be reading this :P ).

[PapadakosPanagiotis]

Anyone expreriences random small freezes with kms? This is on a ATI Mobility Radeon X2300

[agd5f]

Anyone expreriences random small freezes with kms? This is on a ATI Mobility Radeon X2300

This is probably due to buffer migrations. The new mm code isn't well tuned yet.

[Fenix-TX]

I'm trying to get kms with latest karmic kernel and using ppa repo from this post, but i think that is not working because on dmesg i have these lines:

[   13.118824] [drm] radeon default to kernel modesetting DISABLED.
[   13.119111] [drm] Initialized radeon 1.30.0 20080528 for 0000:01:00.0 on minor 0

[madman2k]

I'm trying to get kms with latest karmic kernel and using ppa repo from this post, but i think that is not working because on dmesg i have these lines:

[   13.118824] [drm] radeon default to kernel modesetting DISABLED.
[   13.119111] [drm] Initialized radeon 1.30.0 20080528 for 0000:01:00.0 on minor 0

read the comment on the PPA page

[runrun]

I'm trying to boot the latest 0.16 livecd hosted on your link on a machine with an agp x1950pro.
I'm getting a 'Failed to initalize radeon. Disabling IOCTL' error during the boot process and the system stops.
Post #2 says add 'radeon.agpmode=-1' in the kernel command line and ppa says(?) 'radeon.modeset=1'
I assume this is where I'm going wrong trying to boot the live system, pushing f6 when the cd first boots and adding 'radeon.modeset=1' etc returns an unknown option error as you boot - and I don't know how to continue.

[tormod]

Boot with radeon.modeset=1 to use KMS and with radeon.modeset=0 to run without. Official Ubuntu kernels currently default to 0, the xorg-edgers kernels default to 1.

If you have an AGP card, you can force the AGP mode with radeon.agpmode=X where X is 1,2,4,8 (same as the old AGPMode option in xorg.conf, see "man radeon"). You can turn off AGP (and force PCI instead) with radeon.agpmode=-1.

"modinfo radeon" lists all options for the radeon module. For general boot options, see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootOptions

Ignore the "unknown option" warning, it is a false warning.