No GPU acceleration support (Mobility Radeon 9000)

[Nathan]

Inxi -G output:

Code:

$ inxi -G
Graphics:
  Device-1: AMD RV250/M9 GL [Mobility FireGL 9000/Radeon 9000] driver: radeon
    v: kernel
  Display: server: X.Org v: 1.21.1.7 driver: X: loaded: radeon
    unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,vesa dri: swrast gpu: radeon
    resolution: 1024x768~60Hz
  API: EGL v: 1.4,1.5 drivers: kms_swrast,swrast
    platforms: gbm,x11,surfaceless,device
  API: OpenGL v: 4.5 vendor: x.org mesa v: 22.3.6 renderer: llvmpipe (LLVM
    15.0.6 128 bits)

I don't know if I would call it a critical issue or not, but in the context of DSL and making use of older hardware it seems worth mentioning: graphics acceleration for all ATI (now AMD) graphics hardware from the R100 and R200 families is not supported by Mesa 22.x.x which is what is provided by default with the current release candidate of DSL 2024 (AntiX-21?). And that also may be true for Nouveau (NV04-NV20)

In the output from 'inxi -G' (top of the post), this information makes it clear what's going on:

Code:

Display: server: X.Org v: 1.21.1.7 driver: X: loaded: radeon
    unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,vesa dri: swrast gpu: radeon
    resolution: 1024x768~60Hz

Basically the radeon driver is loaded (as opposed to fbdev, modesetting, or vesa), but the DRI part is swrast (software raster?)

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Radeon#Prerequisites
[6] Mesa 22.0 and higher have dropped support for R100 and R200

This applies to all off the Radeon 7xxx, 8xxx, 9xxx graphics cards/chipsets.

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Radeon#Adva...figuration

The "fix" on Gentoo, if desired, is installing mesa-amber and to disable llvm stuff as long as you
don't need it for any other graphics card.

Per Mesa 3D docs (amber):

"After Mesa 21.3, all non-Gallium DRI drivers were removed from the Mesa source-tree. These drivers are still being maintained to some degree, but only on the amber branch, and only for critical fixes.

These drivers include:

• Radeon
  
• r200
  
• i915
  
• i965
  
• Nouveau (the DRI driver for NV04-NV20)
  

"



I'm not sure what can be done about this, since it's a not entirely unexpected outcome of "progress".

But I imagine it could affect some subset of people that might be interested in DSL. That could well be much than I would think since this cover a lot of common graphics cards in the early to mid 2000s.

E.g. NV04-NV20 consists pretty much all NVidia graphics up through the GeForce 4 family.

[Yan]

Try installing firmware-amd-graphics. The package has 12 MB, which may be why it's not included by default.

[Nathan]

Try installing firmware-amd-graphics. The package has 12 MB, which may be why it's not included by default.

Thank you for the suggestion.

Installing firmware-amd-graphics does at least silence the complaint during startup about the lack of firmware when the OS tries to initialize the card.

That doesn't actually fix the "problem", although having not tried Linux on this hardware before it's difficult to be certain how much of a problem it is.

I can load YouTube in Firefox and play a video, but that keeps the CPU pretty busy and the video stutters to the point of it being not practical to watch even at the auto-selected resolution of 360p. It's clear from the "aboutupport" page that Firefox is not using any hardware acceleration.