stress with fglrx driver
March 22nd, 2009
mm; just throwed away several hours by trying to fix fglrx drier on ubuntu intrepiod/amd64/ati hd4830. i made the error and installed it by the official amd website. of course it overwrite several ubuntu xorg files. while repairing all this i found out:
1. deleting an old fglrx
* delete all fglrx packages, if there are some (list them by dpkg -l | grep fglrx
* repairing x: sudo apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-radeon libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri xserver-xorg-core
2. rewriting xorg.conf
dpkg-reconfigure xserver.xorg
then you can begin with reinstalling procedures documented quite often everywhere. if you get an error message, that depth of 8 is not supported; you have to add DefaultDepth 24 into the screen section of xorg.conf.
one word to fglrx driver quality: when you ever thought, that the nvidia linux driver is bad; because it misses some 2d acceleration feautures (don't tell they are fixed with 180.*, there still are some) they are still much better than this fglrx crap. lockups, suddently spinning kwin4, flickering opengl in 3d; that seems typical for fglrx. however it's interesting that all modern 3d drivers seem to have a lot of problems currently. intel has bad performance (compared to windows), nvidia has several acceleration issues (see the "official" forum) and doesn't get compatible to standard dri/dri2 architecture.
the only cards which seem to work are old ati boards who are supported by radeon-driver. or you don't use 3d acceleration.
update
now back with the ubuntu 8.10 repository fglrx driver; stability issues seem to be gone. the performance with kde 4.2.1 is so lala, but it reacts much faster when i disable the ondemand cpu scaling governor. having 2.4ghz all time instead of 800mhz makes reaction much faster. several years ago i hacked around in powernowd to wait some minutes before scaling down the cpu (so that the system is slow when i am not in front of it), but it was the older powernowd system at that time. such changes shall be much simplier now; let's see.
My 5 or 6 year old low end Athlon with $50 nvidia card still rocks under ubuntu. My current uptime is 39 days. I had to reboot getting my scsi scanner to work (i hadn’t bothered for over a year, as i hadn’t any need for it). I might have gotten Linux to rescan the scsi bus without reboot, but couldn’t remember the command, and was in too much of a hurry to look it up. Before that, it had been up for 200+ days. All to say that my video driver is not unstable, and has not been the cause of a crash. I do recall an X death – though it may not have resulted in a reboot. I consider X death to be a crash even without a reboot. While i like having the gpu perform scrolling and enjoy first person shooter games, i value reliability higher. And when faced with having an unreliable driver or a slow driver, i’ve gone with a slow driver every time. This was painful on my Pii, but it is very tolerable on my Athlon, though fps games don’t work.
Comment by Stephen — March 22, 2009 @ 19:11
ok, i forgot old nvidia boards too ;)
Comment by nob — March 22, 2009 @ 20:30