ATI Driver Trouble Under Fedora 8
12 Nov 2007So, is anyone else experiencing troubles with the proprietary ATI driver on Fedora 8? How about on an updated F7 system?
My HP Compaq 6715b notebook comes with ATI Radeon X1270 video 128MB RAM dedicated plus 192MB RAM shared) and a 1680×1050 resolution 15.4 inch LCD (at 61Hz, it would seem). I’ve installed the proprietary ATI driver in order to get it working, as Fedora’s tools get really confused about widescreen setups, it would seem.
Here are the relevent package versions:
# rpm -qa | egrep ‘(fglrx|kernel)’ kmod-fglrx-8.42.3-8.lvn8 kmod-fglrx-2.6.23.1-49.fc8-8.42.3-8.lvn8 xorg-x11-drv-fglrx-8.42.3-7.lvn8.1 kernel-devel-2.6.23.1-49.fc8 kernel-devel-2.6.23.1-42.fc8 kernel-2.6.23.1-42.fc8 kernel-2.6.23.1-49.fc8 kernel-headers-2.6.23.1-49.fc8 xorg-x11-drv-fglrx-libs-32bit-8.42.3-7.lvn8.1
(As you can see, I haven’t removed the original kernel, yet. Maybe I’ll go do that now.)
However, I seem to be getting some fairly odd artifacts on-screen with this driver under F8, including some odd extra sprite garbage with the mouse cursor. I had experienced some oddities under F7, but they were confined to GNOME applications (no others exhibited any issues). It doesn’t matter if I enable or disable “Desktop Effects” either (they won’t successfully enable, anyway). A RAM test (memtest86+) shows that there’s nothing wrong with the system memory, but that doesn’t test the video card. There are ATI tools for testing the video card more fully, but I haven’t had time to try them out, yet.
Since FC6, Fedora systems rely on the X server detecting proper monitor and other configuration parameters every time it starts. This has been far less than reliable on a wide variety of machines that I’ve been running into over the past year. I’d like to get some more information about other people’s experiences with this, before I file a “bug” report about this. It’s really becoming an embarrassing problem as things worked much better when we would get a finished configuration file by default in FC5 and earlier.
Don’t do it. I’ve run into similar problems on my laptop. However, there is supposedly a new open source driver already out called radeonhd. It didn’t work for me, maybe it will work for you?
Cheers,
Herlo
@Clint Savage
I tried grabbing the radeonhd driver package for F7 from the openSUSE build service website (after some Google searching), but I (apparently) haven’t figured out all the other parts needed to get it to start, I just got black screens with no mouse and no responsiveness to
CTRL+ALTcommands (and it looked like it locked things up once, too).I also took a look at running with the avivo driver, but no luck getting the config to work, yet.
BTW, the radeonhd driver docs do list my particular GPU chip as supported.
I experience those artifacts too with a LCD (1280×1024@75Hz) and the ATI proprietary driver. With the “radeon” driver everything was fine.
You should fill that bug report ;)
Also, pressing Alt+F1 and then Alt+F7 removes those artifacts.
This isn’t exclusive to Fedora. I am running that same 8.42.3 ATI driver on Ubuntu 7.10 and see the same thing. The only real difference I see, is that I do have Desktop Effects on.
If you can I suggest rolling the driver back to 8.37.6 if you can.
I installed the 8.42.3 driver to get support for AIGLX, but it made my X session too unstable. I am not back to using XGL and it is more stable, but still not yet as stable as it was under the 8.37.6 driver
@dragossh
I’ve finished searching through Red Hat’s bugzilla and haven’t found anything that would apply. Still, there could be an existing bug report that would, but that’s why there’s a dup-marking ability in Bugzilla :) . So, I’ll be filing that bug later today or tomorrow.
Also, I did discover that switching to a virtual terminal (
CTRL+ALT+F4, for example) then back to X (ALT+F7, typically) “fixed” those artifacts, but only temporarily. They kept coming back on my box. Thanks for the comment on that, as I’d forgot to put into my post. Mia culpa.However, after booting into Windows (Vista Business 64-bit) last night, I’m not getting any of those artifacts at all today under Linux. I’ll have to assume that something the Windows driver did has “reset” the card such that the Linux driver isn’t having any more problems. Goes to figure, eh?
@Lonnie Olson
You’re right, it’s the driver, not Fedora.
You have a good idea about backing off to the earlier version, which has been more stable for a lot of people. However, that’s a little tougher for some folks on Fedora who use the Livna driver packages, as they don’t have the older version being built for the newer kernels. That’s not much of an issue for me, as I could simply download their SRPM (if it’s still available) and rebuild it for the current kernel. I would then have to prevent YUM from trying to update that package, however, which isn’t that hard.
After a long night of migrating my nx6125 with FC7 x86_64 to the 6715b with FC8 x86_64, here is how I got my dual head display working with no problems.
1. Executed ati-driver-installer-8.42.3-x86.x86_64.run with the defaults.
2. Executed aticonfig -f –initial=dual-head –screen-layout=right –resolution=0,1680×1050 –resolution=1,1024×768
My only annoyance is the gui control panel is non operational.
Hope it helps…
Hi,
I have some artifacts, too. Im using F7 with kernel 2.6.23.1-21.fc7.
If I open “ATI Catalyst Control Panel” the artifacts disappear for some time.
xorg-x11-drv-fglrx-8.42.3-6.lvn7
kernel-headers-2.6.23.1-21.fc7
kernel-devel-2.6.23.1-21.fc7
kernel-2.6.23.1-21.fc7
kmod-fglrx-8.42.3-4.2.6.23.1_21.fc7
Coolcat
Oh, its a ATI Radeon 9800 Pro card.