Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Radeon KMS driver - what benefits?

[Robin Atwood]

On Tuesday 23 November 2010, Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
> On 11/22/2010 07:02 PM, Robin Atwood wrote:
> > I have just gone through the steps to use the Radeon KMS driver on my old
> > laptop which has an RV350 [Mobility Radeon 9600 M10]. Everything seems to
> > work all right and I get the right "render string" from glxinfo.
> > However, I thought it might enable compositing to work on the KDE4
> > desktop but there is no change. What's more, glxgears used to give about
> > 2200 FPS but now it's 50! So have I been wasting my time?
>
> You have to enable compositing yourself in System Settings.

Of course, but it didn't take.

> KMS means you're using DRI2 now, which results in a VSync'ed OpenGL
> rendering.  Though I'd expect 60FPS because of VSync, not 50 :-P
>
> One other thing you should do is to enable the "gallium" USE flag and
> re-emerge Mesa.  Then switch to the Gallium driver using:
>
>    eselect mesa r300 gallium
>
> Because that driver is the recommended one for your hardware (R300).
> The classic driver should be avoided.

Thanks, I would try that, but...

# emerge -av media-libs/mesa

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild     U ] x11-libs/libX11-1.4.0 [1.3.6] USE="-doc -ipv6 -static-libs -
test (-xcb%*)" 2,036 kB
[ebuild   R   ] media-libs/mesa-7.8.2  USE="nptl pic xcb -debug (-gallium) -
motif (-selinux)" VIDEO_CARDS="radeon -intel -mach64 -mga -nouveau -r128 -
savage -sis -svga -tdfx -via" 0 kB  

I set "gallium" in /etc/make.conf but (-gallium) means the flag is turned off 
in a profile somewhere?

-Robin
-- 
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Robin Atwood.

"Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
 Where there ain't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst"
         from "Mandalay" by Rudyard Kipling
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