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AMD/ATI Open Source Drivers (radeon, r128, mach64)

This page describes use of the open source display drivers for ATI/AMD graphics hardware on Debian systems. For information on the proprietary driver, see ATIProprietary.

Identification

The AMD/ATI graphics processing unit (GPU) series/codename of an installed video card can usually be identified using the lspci command. For example:

• $ lspci -nn | grep VGA
  01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Barts PRO [Radeon HD 6850] [1002:6739]

See HowToIdentifyADevice/PCI for more information.

Drivers

Support for AMD (nee ATI) graphics hardware is provided by the xserver-xorg-video-ati driver wrapper package, which depends on three hardware-specific driver packages:

• xserver-xorg-video-mach64

• xserver-xorg-video-r128

• xserver-xorg-video-radeon

The ati wrapper driver autodetects whether your hardware has a Radeon, Rage 128, or Mach64 or earlier chip and load the radeon, r128, or mach64 xorg video driver as appropriate.

Supported Devices

The radeon driver in Debian 8 "Jessie" supports R100 to Hawaii (Radeon 7000 - Radeon R9 290) GPUs. See the radeon(4) manual page and the radeon page on the X wiki for more information.

Firmware

Proprietary, binary-only firmware (aka microcode) was removed from the Debian kernel's radeon DRM driver in linux-2.6 2.6.29-1, to resolve Debian bug 494009. The firmware can be provided by installing the firmware-linux-nonfree package.

Without this package installed, poor 2D/3D performance in the radeon driver is commonly experienced. Some GPUs may require firmware to operate the X Window System.

Installation

The following procedure will install the open source display driver packages, DRI modules (for 3D acceleration) and driver firmware/microcode:

1. Add "contrib" and "non-free" components to /etc/apt/sources.list, for example:

   # Debian 8 "Jessie"
   deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free

2. Update the list of available packages:

   # apt-get update

3. Install the firmware-linux-nonfree, libgl1-mesa-dri and xserver-xorg-video-ati packages:

   # apt-get install firmware-linux-nonfree libgl1-mesa-dri xserver-xorg-video-ati

4. Restart your system to load GPU device firmware.

Troubleshooting

• Use of firmware/microcode used by the radeon DRM driver can be verified using the dmesg command. For example:

  $ dmesg | grep -E 'drm|radeon' | grep -iE 'firmware|microcode'
  [    5.268609] [drm] Loading BARTS Microcode
  [    5.329862] radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware radeon/BARTS_pfp.bin
  [    5.341300] radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware radeon/BARTS_me.bin
  [    5.347745] radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware radeon/BTC_rlc.bin
  [    5.347911] radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware radeon/BARTS_mc.bin
  [    5.353336] radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware radeon/BARTS_smc.bin
  [    5.369449] radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware radeon/SUMO_uvd.bin

  • If files were unable to be loaded, ensure the firmware-linux-nonfree package is installed (refer to Installation).

• Screen flickering with Adobe Flash: see FlashPlayer#flickering.

Configuration

In most cases, manual configuration for the open source display drivers is not required, as the Xorg X server automatically detects and configures available hardware.

The following optional configuration can be used to increase 3D performance. See the xorg.conf(5) and radeon(4) manual pages for more information.

• Section "Device"
   Driver "radeon"
   Identifier "My GPU"
   ...
   Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"
   # XAA/EXA
   Option "AccelDFS"    "1"
   # 1/0 On for PCIE, off for AGP
   # Manpage: Use  or  don't  use accelerated EXA DownloadFromScreen hook
   # when possible.
   Option "AGPMode" "1"
   # 1-8 Does not affect PCIE models.
   Option "AGPFastWrite" "1"
   # 1/0 Does not affect PCIE models. Not recommended.
   Option "GARTSize" "64"
   # 0-64 Megabytes of gart (system) memory used.
   # Wrongly defaults to 8MB sometimes, see your logfile.
   # Bigger seems better.
   Option "EnablePageFlip" "1"
   # 1/0 Increases 3D performance substantially
   # seemingly in XAA mode only
   Option "ColorTiling" "1"
   # 1/0 Increases 3D performance substantially
   # affected stability only positively on my system
  EndSection

See Also

• ATIProprietary - Installing the closed source proprietary driver

• Testing performance

External Links

• http://x.org/wiki/radeon