This article discusses how to install and use the open-source Radeon and RadeonHD display drivers for X11.
Contents
Determining your hardware
Run this command to determine what kind of video card you have:
lspci -v | grep VGA
Supported Cards
The radeon driver supports R100/R200 (Radeon 7000 – Radeon 9250) and R300/R400/R500 (Radeon 9500 – Radeon X1950) class chips. See the radeon page on the X wiki for more information. The radeonhd driver is for R500 and newer cards. See the the radeonhd page on the X wiki for more info.
First try free drivers radeon and radeonhd, installing following packages : xserver-xorg-video-radeon, xserver-xorg-video-raeonhd and xserver-xorg-video-ati
Installing proprietary firmware
If free drivers don't work, try proprietary firmware. Binary-only firmware was removed from the radeon DRM drivers in linux-2.6 2.6.29-1, to resolve Debian bug 494009. It is now packaged in firmware-linux-nonfree.
For Debian Squeeze and later releases, you will need to install proprietary firmware if you have one of the following Radeon-based cards:
- Radeon R100-family
- Radeon R200-family
- Radeon R300-family
- Radeon R400-family
- Radeon R500-family
- Radeon R600
- Radeon RS600
- Radeon RS690
- Radeon RS780
- Radeon RV610
- Radeon RV620
- Radeon RV630
- Radeon RV635
- Radeon RV670
- Radeon RV710
- Radeon RV730
- Radeon RV770
The firmware in question, id est the CP/PFP microcode, can be installed by first enabling the non-free repository for your Debian release and issuing the following command:
aptitude install firmware-linux-nonfree
Configuring the kernel
You will need Direct Rendering Manager as well as Accelerated Graphics Port support in your kernel, preferably as modules. If you are using the stock Debian kernel, you should already have these. To check for DRM support, issue this command:
grep DRM_RADEON /boot/config-$(uname -r)
The output should be:
CONFIG_DRM_RADEON=m
If this value is n, then you will have to rebuild your kernel.
To check for AGP support, run:
grep AGP /boot/config-$(uname -r)
The output should be:
CONFIG_AGP=y CONFIG_AGP_AMD64=y CONFIG_AGP_INTEL=m CONFIG_AGP_SIS=m CONFIG_AGP_VIA=m
Note that you will only need support for your specific chipset.
If you do need to rebuild your kernel, you can find AGP under:
Device Drivers --->
Graphics Support --->
/dev/agpgart (AGP Support) --->
- (Your chipset)
and DRM under:
Device Drivers --->
Graphics Support --->
Direct Rendering Manager --->
- ATI Radeon
Editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Essentially, you need to set your device's driver to either "radeon" or "radeonhd" as such:
Section "Device" Identifier "Device0" Driver "radeon" EndSection
There are also plenty of options for the driver too. You can find out about them in radeon's man page:
man 4 radeon
Enabling 3D acceleration
It is necessary to install driver libraries in order to utilize the card's 3D capabilities:
aptitude install libgl1-mesa-dri
Testing performance
First, you will need the Mesa utilities:
aptitude install mesa-utils
To determine whether 3D acceleration is working, use the glxinfo tool. Run the following command:
glxinfo | grep render
The output should be:
direct rendering: Yes
To see how many frames per second your video card is putting out, install the mesa-utils package, then run the following command:
glxgears -info
Troubleshooting
Radeon Xpress 200M (R300) on laptop
During a long time, on laptops with Radeon Xpress 200M (R300) you may get some random colored stripes (especially after suspending display power). This is problably due to a bug into free driver. A solution may be to switch off, then switch on the backlight with radeontool (eponymic package).
sudo radeontool light off sleep 1 sudo radeontool light on
See Also
ATIProprietary - Installing the closed source proprietary driver