[CentOS] hardware acceleration with radeon

Sat Jul 9 21:25:38 UTC 2005
Aleksandar Milivojevic <alex at milivojevic.org>

Paul wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-07-09 at 18:56 +1000, Rohan Walsh wrote:
> 
>>Hi,
>>I am using CentOS4 on i686.
>>Can anyone tell me how to get hardware acceleration to work with a
>>radeon 9000 using xorg and dri (not ATI's proprietary driver)
>>I had it working fine on fc1.
> 
> 
> It *should* work right out of the box ... but I don't have any systems
> with 9000s on them right now to verify.

I have different, much older Radeon.  Seems that support for some Radeon 
cards isn't stable with current kernels.  Some cards seems to work just 
fine, with others kernel is crashing all the time.  Because of that DRI 
(needed for HW acceleration) is disabled if you have Radeon card.  You 
may try enabling it and checking if things work for you (if your 
machines starts crashing or misbehaving, just disable it).  Mine happens 
to work just fine, and even on my old Radeon enabling DRI made huge 
difference.

Things to check:

/etc/X11/xorg.conf.  In the Device section (near the end of file), does 
it have a line that reads:

        Option "DRI"

If not add it.  Mine looks something like this (you'll have at least 
BoardName line different, and my best guess without checking docs is 
that 9000 uses same driver as 7500, if not Driver line will be different 
too):

Section "Device"
         Identifier  "Videocard0"
         Driver      "radeon"
         VendorName  "Videocard vendor"
         BoardName   "ATI Radeon 7500"
         Option      "DRI"
EndSection

After you save the file, restart X server.  The far easiest way is 
pressing ctrl-alt-backspace.  Be warned that this will kill all GUI 
applications running, so make sure you exit from everything.

Once X server restarts and you login again, check /var/log/Xorg.0.log. 
Somewhere inthere you should find this four lines (they do not appear 
one after another in log file, you'll have to search for each separately):

(II) Loading extension XFree86-DRI
(II) LoadModule: "radeon"
(**) RADEON(0): Option "DRI"
(II) RADEON(0): [DRI] installation complete

Also, /sbin/lsmod should show radeon kernel module loaded.