Jessie, Gallium graphic driver and Radeon HD 6670

[vey]

Hi.
I want to ask about how use of Gallium driver looks in Debian Jessie?
Is it feature which we gets out of the box with xserver-xorg-video-ati package or do I need to make some additional magic to get it?
How to check if I have driver with Gallium support?

I am asking because I want to get League of Legends working on my Debian. I have already tried with Play on Linux (very poor performance) and directly through wine (better than Play on Linux but 17 FPS is not enough in this particular game). My next attempt will be to use modified version of wine (wine + Gallium). I read a little on web about how Gallium could boost performance in games, by removing one layer of abstraction between game calls and hardware, and I want to give it a try.

I am using Linux for few years right now, but so far not as "power user" - that's why I ask these questions in beginners group. Also please be merciful if I am make things up - it's lack of experience and knowledge. Thanks

[bw123]

Hi, It's okay. You're on the right forum to find some info. I like Radeon, and ATI products myself, but I tend to stick to software that is included in the free section of the Debian repository. I use the free radeon driver, but also have a non-free binary firmware installed to enable Radeon cards to work correctly with some graphic programs.

Do a search of the forum, not only on the Gallium issue, but on League of Legends, and also on Radeon cards, and then after some research, you can edit your question to be a little more specific, and provide more information about why this program can't work correctly.


http://forums.debian.net/search.php?keywords=gallium

[Head_on_a_Stick]

I think it will be buried away in the output of `glxinfo`

You should be using it as long as direct rendering is enabled:

Code: Select all

glxinfo|grep rend

https://packages.debian.org/jessie/mesa-utils

EDIT: You do have the non-free firmware installed, right?
https://wiki.debian.org/AtiHowTo#Firmware

[stevepusser]

I have a report that the newer xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu driver can be backported and run against the newer libdrm-dev in jessie-backports. You'll need the newer kernel in backports also, since that includes the kernel part of the driver. It wouldn't hurt to upgrade the rest of mesa from backports, too. Your hardware has to be one of those supported by the driver, too.

[vey]

Thanks for replays.
Right now I have fresh install of Debian. Pure as it could be (reinstall after previous experiments with graphic drivers). And now I would like to do everything with head up - so questions firsts and then actions.

So far I didn't installed non-free firmware cause I was wondering if this is just low-level drivers or is it something more advanced. I am aware that now I use vesa driver without acceleration and it's very limited.

I am basing my knowledge on this wiki page linux binary drivers and graphics stack.
Please take a look at image with linux graphics stack - I don't know which part of it is this non-free firmware.

I have installed xorg and xserver and also have xserver-xorg-video-ati, xserver-xorg-video-radeon installed, which is blue/purple "display driver" part. I have libdrm-radeon1 which is blue part under libGL. So last is "DRM hardware specific" part - in Linux kernel - so that's why I am wondering if this is non-free firmware. Is it right or am I wrong?

Here AMD open source drivers, I had read that xserver-xorg-video-radeon need to use proprietary microcode to get hardware acceleration. Is this what non-free firmware package contains?

EDIT: @stevepusser - I think there is no need for using xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu - from what I see it only adds GCN and Polaris support, comparing to xserver-xorg-video-radeon. My hardware don't have this technologies (Radeon HD6670).

[pendrachken]

You need to use the radeon driver with that card, and you need the non-free firmware to get hardware 3D acceleration for games and accelerated OpenGL.


Just install firmware-linux-nonfree ( from the non-free debian repo ) and reboot, then see how your framerates are.


to install the firmware you have to add "contrib non-free" on the deb repository lines in /etc/apt/sources.list

I.E. it should look like this, but with your local repository address:

deb http://my.debian.mirror/debian main contrib non-free