AMD Zacate E-350

[Nesousx]

Hi all,

I just bought this card in the hope of running a NAS + htpc config but so far I have had no luck. I have spent about 30 hours in the last 2 days with no success...

I tried Sabayon distribution which gave me the best results: everything working out of the box, but once I updated the system it was no longer working...

I am now running debian 6 because this is my every day's OS and feel at ease with it, however I am not a Linux power user.
[*]Right now, I am using fglrx drivers 11.3 from ATI website, my desktop is in working in full HD with direct rendering activated. I have black borders, but used the "ugly fix" on my TV settings in order to remove those bars.
[*]I don't have any sound, and in alsamixer in only shows the SPDIF "sound card". I wish I could use the sound over HDMI.
[*]In XBMC, VAAPI is enabled in the settings but isn't working during playback: huge CPU load and stuff. I compiled and installed splitted desktop version of gstreamer, didn't help.

I am totally clueless and willing to give all the command line outputs you want or need to help me.

Thanks a lot in advance.

The card is an Asus E35m1-M Pro. And I tried Sabayon (after being stuck in Debian the very first time) because a friend of mine runs a Zacate laptop out of the box and flawlessly on this distro.

[Nesousx]

Sorry about spamming this thread, but I could get everything to work but the hardware vaapi acceleration (doesn't work on XBMC (but option is present) nor on mplayer (no option at all). Still looking for help on this.

[hoohoo]

Bought this one two weeks ago, it works well with OpenSuSE 11.4 and the current AMD E350 64 bit Linux driver. The only issue I found was I had to manually set the over/under scan to get full screen 1920/1200. Video playback tears a little bit but that's par for the course with AMD & Linux in my experience.

With Win7/64 this Sapphire locks up loading the disk.sys (or is it disk.drv?) driver, LOL.

I'd tried an ASUS micro-ATX E350 board previously with OpenSUSE 11.3 - nothing but trouble and I returned it for refund. But the ASUS worked flawlessly with Win7/64 however.

I care a lot more about Linux working, so I'm keeping this Sapphire.

[soda]

Hi all,

I just bought this card in the hope of running a NAS + htpc config but so far I have had no luck. I have spent about 30 hours in the last 2 days with no success...

I tried Sabayon distribution which gave me the best results: everything working out of the box, but once I updated the system it was no longer working...

I am now running debian 6 because this is my every day's OS and feel at ease with it, however I am not a Linux power user.
[*]Right now, I am using fglrx drivers 11.3 from ATI website, my desktop is in working in full HD with direct rendering activated. I have black borders, but used the "ugly fix" on my TV settings in order to remove those bars.
[*]I don't have any sound, and in alsamixer in only shows the SPDIF "sound card". I wish I could use the sound over HDMI.
[*]In XBMC, VAAPI is enabled in the settings but isn't working during playback: huge CPU load and stuff. I compiled and installed splitted desktop version of gstreamer, didn't help.

I am totally clueless and willing to give all the command line outputs you want or need to help me.

Thanks a lot in advance.

Hello I will try and help you the best I can because i believe we have a very similar setup. First there is not gonna be any sound over hdmi as of yet. I'm in the process of filing a bug report so hopefully this gets resolved soon. For VAAPI to work under debian the easiest way i found is to use the debian-multimedia repository and install libva1. This gives XBMC the ablity to offload video rendering to the VAAPI library, however the VAAPI isnt supported by AMD so you gotta use something that converts VAAPI to XvBA (which AMD supports). The debian package can be found at splitted desktops. This is would be to easy thou and you probably get some error like fglrx_drv_video.so cannot be found return code: -1. VAAPI looks for video card drivers, in Debian, in the directory /usr/lib/dri but xvba-video package installs them in /usr/lib/va/drivers/. So all you gotta do is a copy or link the drivers to the right directory.

To long to read:

• there is no sound over hdmi yet
• to fix VAAPI in Debian 6 simply use the command

  ln -s /usr/lib/va/drivers/* /usr/lib/dri/

[Kano]

Nope that does not help for Debian 6.0 aka squeeze. I wrote a test script that did not create symlinks but changed the package to match the new xvba-va-driver package (but would work with any xvba-video update package too). The libva 1.0.1 in squeeze seems to be too old. No correct vainfo output at least.

Instead of installing xvba-video manually you can just install in in Debian testing/sid:

apt-get install xvba-va-driver

Ubuntu natty has 0.7.7 instead of 0.7.8, maybe file a bug. You can fetch of course the debian package for it:

http://packages.debian.org/sid/xvba-va-driver

Best get of the old xvba-video package if you installed it already:

dpkg --purge xvba-video

it does nothing anyway when you don't use libva from

http://www.splitted-desktop.com/~gbeauchesne/libva/

which uses a completely different packageing. It is really sad that those packages are not compatible. Also why does it need to be in non-free? It would be more logical when it would be in the normal repository just like vdpau-va-driver as the xvba sdk is available - so source could be released too...

[soda]

Nope that does not help for Debian 6.0 aka squeeze. I wrote a test script that did not create symlinks but changed the package to match the new xvba-va-driver package (but would work with any xvba-video update package too). The libva 1.0.1 in squeeze seems to be too old. No correct vainfo output at least.

Instead of installing xvba-video manually you can just install in in Debian testing/sid:

apt-get install xvba-va-driver

Ubuntu natty has 0.7.7 instead of 0.7.8, maybe file a bug. You can fetch of course the debian package for it:

http://packages.debian.org/sid/xvba-va-driver

Best get of the old xvba-video package if you installed it already:

dpkg --purge xvba-video

it does nothing anyway when you don't use libva from

http://www.splitted-desktop.com/~gbeauchesne/libva/

which uses a completely different packageing. It is really sad that those packages are not compatible. Also why does it need to be in non-free? It would be more logical when it would be in the normal repository just like vdpau-va-driver as the xvba sdk is available - so source could be released too...

Can you post any logs or error messages?

[Kano]

In order to make testing more easy i updated my mplayer vaapi script. vlc from natty repo did never work nor mplayer with vaapi with natty, but i can use vaapi with Kanotix Hellfire (squeeze based).

wget -qO- http://kanotix.com/files/fix/mplayer-vaapi-latest.txt|sudo sh

I use the new package names for libva, vdpau-video and xvba-video. I also replace libva with the sds version - i did that with some extra replaces/conflicts/provides statements and i increased version to 1:0.32 instead of 0.32. vainfo is working fine, but thats all... My tests have been done with Kubuntu natty 64 bit and Kanotix Hellfire 64 bit. Using my own system it works (when you forget h264 l5.1), using natty all i get is segfault with vlc (repo) or mplayer vaapi. No differenence when i keep the libva from U. Test card: ati hd 5670.

[neckname]

Hi. Does anyone know why they disabled acceleration for Evergreen-GPUs?
A friend of mine has a new notebook (IdeaPad S205) and is very unhappy because there is no acceleration at all. We tried the newest Ubuntu, OpenSuse and even installed the latest xf86-video-ati while running a Gentoo liveDVD. The Xorg.log said that Evergreen GPUs were not yet supported, which I found odd because http://xorg.freedesktop.org said otherwise.
Then I found this:

http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-dri...ly/016250.html

Stable release of xf86-video-ati for the 6.13.x series.

Main features: server 1.9 support, evergreen accel disabled explicitly,[...]

Could someone explain to me why they disabled the acceleration and tell me what the current status is?
Using fglrx is not a very good option since we didn't get proper dualhead support.

Thanks.

[bridgman]

Hi. Does anyone know why they disabled acceleration for Evergreen-GPUs? A friend of mine has a new notebook (IdeaPad S205) and is very unhappy because there is no acceleration at all. We tried the newest Ubuntu, OpenSuse and even installed the latest xf86-video-ati while running a Gentoo liveDVD. The Xorg.log said that Evergreen GPUs were not yet supported, which I found odd because http://xorg.freedesktop.org said otherwise.

I think you need Ubuntu 11.04 beta or F15 to get open source driver versions which support E350. The part was only launched this year so anything older won't have a chance of including support.

Not sure what you mean about "why they disabled acceleration for Evergreen" unless you're talking about that mailing list post from a year ago when Evergreen support was only partially implemented (and so was turned off to avoid any problems).

http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-dri...ly/016250.html

Could someone explain to me why they disabled the acceleration and tell me what the current status is? Using fglrx is not a very good option since we didn't get proper dualhead support.

Status for the Ontario/Zacate Fusion parts is that support has been present in the upstream projects and is just starting to be pulled into distro versions now. I believe Ubuntu 11.04 and Fedora 15 are your best bets if you want out of box support.

Evergreen support has been there for longer but the Fusion parts require slightly different programming.

[neckname]

Thans you for your reply.
I just searched the sourcecode and found:

./src/radeon_driver.c
    if (info->ChipFamily >= CHIP_FAMILY_CEDAR) {
        xf86DrvMsg(pScrn->scrnIndex, X_INFO,
                   "No DRI yet on Evergreen\n");

for xf86-video-ati-6.13.1 to xf86-video-ati-6.14.1, which is the latest version. I didn't find any changes to this file in the git repository after the release of 6.14.1, so I guess well have to wait some more.