User talk:67.239.165.48

2012-03-23T20:59:20Z

124.171.204.113:

* I don't know who's editing the Fedora 16 Fglrx page, but the first paragraph titled "Please Consider" was originally written evidently to push a particular license (GPL) rather than present procedures and solutions. I've edited that to make it somewhat neutral but someone seems intent on pushing radeon first. Besides the fact that radeon is already the default installed driver on most distros, there isn't really a need to mention radeon at all other than to state that it exists, since a procedure is generally not needed for radeon installation. That makes a radeon driver discussion redundant unless you are pushing GPL. IMO this site should not be used for pimping licenses but rather for presenting solutions.

** That's me, check the history. I actually like your idea of presenting two driver options and I've written a more impartial overview of each driver. I see you're still editing so I'll wait till you're done to apply it. I also disagree with some things you've stated: The broken module compilation is fixed with a two-line sourcecode comment, we should include the fix rather that just say "it's busted", I'm using fglrx on 3.2.9-2 fine. I'm also completely removing your dracut step, this is far too complex for a regular user who doesn't understand initramfs, it also leaves the system in a state where it may not actually have a graphics driver if fglrx stuffs up. Blacklisting on the kernel line is sufficient and is what the RPMFusion RPM scripts and the Official installation script do anyway. --[[User:Super Jamie|Super Jamie]] 06:02, 22 March 2012 (CDT)
** Changes made. Feel free to contact me via the email address on my userpage if you'd like to discuss directly, here is fine too. --[[User:Super Jamie|Super Jamie]] 06:48, 22 March 2012 (CDT)

** Ok, I see. It's nice to put a name to the text. As far as the 3.2.9-1 fix goes, I assumed you would have gleaned that there was no other solution afaik. But I am glad there is a solution and that it's being published. I personally tested it last night and it works on 64 bit Fedora; however there seems to be a problem getting the method to work on 32 bit.
** Ah I don't have a 32-bit install to check, it has worked on the last two 64-bit kernels tho. The commit that broke it is referenced on the forum page I linked to, maybe look for that commit in the 32-bit source? I took out the first part of the document, you're right, let's just give people information about installing the damn driver :) Thanks for your help in making this better, I maintained the F14 document as well, it's come a long way since then but has always been lacking in multi-monitor suggestions. I used to have three screens in 2007 but gave up and bought a massive single screen, then XRandR became popular a few releases later. --[[Special:Contributions/124.171.204.113|124.171.204.113]] 15:59, 23 March 2012 (CDT)

Fedora 16 Installation Guide

2012-03-22T21:00:26Z

124.171.204.113: Undo revision 8272 by 67.239.165.48 (talk)

= Two Driver Choices =

There are two video drivers you can choose to run your ATI video card, one is called ''fglrx'', the other is ''radeon''.

=== Fglrx - the Official AMD/ATI driver ===

This is the driver written and distributed by AMD, who own and do the work in the development of the hardware and therefore also own and do the work on the internal specs of the hardware. By virtue of the fact that AMD/ATI are the ones that pay hardware engineers and software engineers across the world to work on their products, they of course can provide a full-featured driver which supports all the capabilities of the hardware. The driver has two parts; a small kernel module which acts as a loader for the Xorg part of the driver, and then the Xorg modules themselves. Although AMD chooses to pay software engineers to work on Radeon project they also choose to distribute this full featured driver under a closed source license. The licensing of the product is ultimately irrelevant to this procedural document however and lies squarely in the domain of user choice.

''fglrx'' was originally written only for ATI's FireGL professional workstation cards (targeting the same market as nVidia's Quadro range) however it was soon expanded to include almost the whole ATI range. AMD continued to extend and improve the driver after their acquisition of ATI. This driver also includes the ''Catalyst Control Center'' tool (amdcccle) for configuring features like forcing anti-aliasing and anistropic filtering on for all OpenGL processing.

If you are running newer games, such as most things you'd get off Steam, ''fglrx'' is the best choice. If you have a game which produces graphical glitches under the Free driver, it's worth trying this driver to see if the game works. Generally, performance in all 3D games and 3D applications will be drastically better with Fglrx. 2D performance slightly less in some cases than the radeon driver, but not much according to recent benchmarks. AMD has been working on the 2D performance of Fgrlx with very good results. The 3D performance of Fglrx far outstrips radeon, making it "the" choice for gamers. In recent benchmark evaluations using Warsow, Fglrx showed itself capable of over 900% better 3D performance than Radeon. Other tests in the same group showed 100% or better 3D performance. Reference: http://tinyurl.com/7p3htwp

Each driver as pros and cons, try both and see which is most suitable for your needs. The best thing about Linux is the choice to run whatever software components you like.

=== radeon - the in-kernel driver ===

This is the Free Software driver included in the mainline Linux kernel. This driver is written by an open source community with no access to the hardware specs and is released under the GNU GPL. If software freedom is your main concern, this is the driver for you.

Historically, the ''radeon'' driver couldn't do much, not even 2D acceleration. However, in Fedora 16's 3.1 and 3.2 kernels this driver is making real progress. It now supports 2D compositing, many 3D functions such as GLSL and Pixel Shaders, as well as other useful features like Kernel Mode Setting. There is currently a large push in graphics driver development upstream in the kernel, so this driver's expected to get even better in kernels 3.3 and 3.4.

The ''radeon'' driver packaged with Fedora 16 will easily run desktop compositing (eg: gnome-shell, compiz, transparent terminal). It manages 60fps VSync at 1920x1200 in many 3D games (eg: ''Darkplaces'' Quake engine, ''OpenArena'' Quake 3 engine) with no problems. Depending on your CPU, constant 45fps in 1080p ''Minecraft'' is easily doable.

You can read more about the radeon driver on [http://www.x.org/wiki/radeon the XOrg Wiki]. You can also find a [http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature list of supported features] and [http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonProgram list of supported software] if you'd like to investigate using this driver.

It's worth noting that 2D performance is actually better in this driver than the proprietary driver. If you're only using Gnome 3 and games that don't require decent direct rendering performance, this may be an option. With regard to battery life on laptops, it's worth noting that just the power stack in Fglrx is larger than the entire Radeon driver as a whole. So superior battery performance will be obtained from Fgrlx.

= Installing the Official AMD driver =

== Requirements ==

The AMD-supplied driver will work best in most cases if there is no xorg.conf file present before you begin the installation process. Move any existing xorg.conf files out of the /etc/X11 directory before installation.

You will need version 11.11 of the ATI driver or later for Fedora 16, earlier versions will not work with the version of XOrg that F16 ships with.

You require a Radeon HD2000 series or better to use the latest AMD-supplied driver.

=== kernel-3.2.9-2.fc16 and onwards ===

Due to an upstream sourcecode change in the Fedora ''kernel-headers'' package, building of AMD's ''fglrx'' module will currently fail with kernels 3.2.9-2.fc16 and later.

To fix this, we can revert a small edit. Open the file '''/usr/src/kernels/`uname -r`/arch/x86/include/asm/uaccess_64.h''' in a text editor.

On line 56 and 57 you will see:

<pre>
else
WARN(1, "Buffer overflow detected!\n");
</pre>

Comment this out so it reads:

<pre>
// else
// WARN(1, "Buffer overflow detected!\n");
</pre>

Your AMD kernel module will now build correctly. You may have to reboot into the new kernel and force the module rebuild with

<pre>
su -
akmods --force
</pre>

then reboot again.

* Reference: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=277547

=== Multiple Monitor Setups ===

If you have an existing multiple monitor setup, copy your existing xorg.conf to as safe place, follow one of the install procedures, then transfer relevant sections of your old xorg.conf into the new version generated with aticonfig if required.

Here are some resources for those having difficulty getting their multiple monitors running:

* http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Xorg_RandR_1.2
* http://wiki.debian.org/XStrikeForce/HowToRandR12
* man aticonfig
* One of the [[Ubuntu]] guides on this Wiki.
* AMD's own Catalyst documentation

If you need to start with a clean slate and all your monitors are connected, you can force a fresh xorg.conf to be generated taking into account the monitors present:

<pre>
su -
aticonfig --initial -f
</pre>

== Pre-built packages from RPMFusion ==

'''RECOMMENDED METHOD'''

This is easier than manually building the driver from AMD as you don't need to worry about passing kernel options via GRUB2, configuring DKMS, rebuilding the kernel module every time you do a kernel upgrade, or cleaning up any mess if you want to remove the driver.

=== Clean up previous Offical AMD driver installation ===

If you're coming from the Official AMD driver to RPMFusion's AMD driver, you'll need to reinstall the ''mesa-libGL'' package as the Official AMD driver installation changes files it contains.

<pre>
su -
yum reinstall mesa-libGL
</pre>

=== Setup RPMFusion ===

There are instructions on http://www.rpmfusion.org/ but this should do it.

<pre>
su -
rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
</pre>

=== Install Catalyst driver packages ===

This procedure is the same for 32-bit and 64-bit, yum will automatically install the correct driver and libs for your architecture.

<pre>
su -
yum install akmod-catalyst xorg-x11-drv-catalyst xorg-x11-drv-catalyst-libs
</pre>

''' 32-bit Libraries on 64-bit OS'''

If you want to play 32-bit games on a 64-bit Fedora installation, you will need to install the 32-bit libraries in addition to the above step.

<pre>
su -
yum install xorg-x11-drv-catalyst-libs.i686
</pre>

''' Kernel module packages '''

Note that there are individual ''kmod-catalyst-'' packages in RPMFusion which supply kernel modules for specific Fedora kernel versions. If you use these and you upgrade the kernel without upgrading the ''kmod-catalyst-'' package, loading the proprietary driver will fail and you'll revert back to the Free ''radeon'' graphics driver. Sometimes there is a day or so between Fedora upgrading their kernel and RPMFusion building a new ''kmod-catalyst-'' package.

The ''akmod-catalyst'' package we installed above automatically builds a new kernel module at boot-time when the kernel is upgraded, so you'll never have to worry about this.

== Official AMD Driver ==

=== Preinstall required packages ===

The script from AMD builds the kernel module and a set of modules for XOrg. The Official AMD installer requires some development packages to be installed:

<pre>
su -
yum install kernel-devel kernel-headers gcc gcc-c++
</pre>

We'll also want to remove any kernel-devel packages from old versions of the kernel. Check your current kernel version with:

<pre>
uname -a
</pre>

Check all installed kernel packages with

<pre>
su -
rpm -qa | grep kernel
</pre>

Remove any ''kernel-devel'' packages which do not match the latest kernel version. For example:

<pre>
su -
yum remove kernel-devel-3.2.9-1.fc16.x86_64
</pre>

Note we are careful to specify the exact package name that was given to us by the rpm command above.

Boot into the latest kernel before continuing. Building the module on a kernel which you don't have ''-devel'' packages for will fail. Building the module on one kernel then booting into another will result in the compiled module not working.

=== Download driver ===

Download the driver for your particular card from http://support.amd.com/

It will look similar to: ''amd-driver-installer-XX-X-XXX.XXX_XX.run''.

=== Install driver ===

Run the file as root in the ''sh'' shell.

<pre>
su -
chmod +x amd-driver-installer-XX-X-XXX.XXX_XX.run
sh ./amd-driver-installer-XX-X-XXX.XXX_XX.run
</pre>

Select the default install, do not generate distribution packages.

=== Confirming Installation ===

Check the build install log:

<pre>tail /usr/share/ati/fglrx-install.log</pre>

You should see data confirming the module build worked:

<pre>build succeeded with return value 0
duplicating results into driver repository...
done.</pre>

=== Uninstalling Official AMD driver ===

Run AMD's uninstall script:

<pre>
su -
sh /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh
</pre>

The following steps are not strictly required because the amd-driver-installer is written to put all files back as they were before the install. One set of files that amd-driver-installer alters is the mesa library set. To be sure of a mint-condition installation (especially if you are upgrading to the next Official driver version) reinstall the following package:

<pre>
su -
yum reinstall mesa-libGL
</pre>

For those running Wine or Crossover from Codeweavers.com, the following command will reinstall all the mesa libraries that (should) be on your system. This example is for users running Wine/Crossover on a 64 bit system:

<pre>
su -
yum reinstall mesa-dri-filesystem.i686 mesa-libGL.x86_64 mesa-dri-drivers.x86_64 mesa-libGL.i686 mesa-dri-filesystem.x86_64 mesa-libEGL.x86_64 mesa-dri-drivers.i686 mesa-libGLU.x86_64
</pre>

= Troubleshooting =

In the event you install the driver and are greeted with a blank screen or corrupted video signal when starting X, you are able to manually disable the Free Software ''radeon'' driver to troubleshoot.

Turn your system off and on again. On the GRUB boot screen, press '''e''' to edit the default boot entry, scroll down to the kernel line (which begins ''linux''), then press '''e''' again to edit the line.

Add the entries '''radeon.modeset=0 blacklist=radeon''' to the end. For example, if your kernel line is

<pre>linux /vmlinuz-3.2.9-1.fc16.x86_64 LANG=en_US.UTF-8</pre>

we'll want to edit it so it is

<pre>linux /vmlinuz-3.2.9-1.fc16.x86_64 LANG=en_US.UTF-8 radeon.modeset=0 rdblacklist=radeon blacklist=radeon</pre>

These entries do the following:
* '''radeon.modeset=0''' disables "Kernel Mode Settting" for the Free Software driver (ie: the driver telling the kernel to setup the screen resolution, instead of XOrg doing it)
* '''rdblacklist=radeon blacklist=radeon''' stops the kernel from loading the Free Software ''radeon'' driver altogether

From here you can manually remove and reinstall the proprietary drivers, either with yum or with PackageKit's ''Add/Remove Software'' application, as desired.

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User talk:67.239.165.48

Fedora 16 Installation Guide