[Solved-ish] How to tell the currently used graphics driver? How to switch?

[KeithZG]

Basically the problem is this, there's weird graphical corruption going on in a new Karmic install (the graphics card is a Radeon X1300). I've been trying to figure out how I could tell what driver it's currently using, but it entirely escapes me. The deprecation of the xorg.conf file (which I sorely miss) leaves me I suppose just looking in /var/log/Xorg.0.log, but the clear signs that are supposed to be there are instead entirely muddled. Google tells me I should look for what driver module it loads, but as it happens it loads a fair number and I have no clue which it actually used.

I would like to, if possible, simply try out the RadeonHD driver (ie. the newer, open-source effort, since the X1300/r516 is supported). My assumption is that it's currently using the "ati" one. Now of course I could whip up an xorg.conf file but since that apparently isn't used anymore I'd like to try to do things the new "proper" way. Soooo, does anybody know how one is supposed to switch around X.org's drivers these days?

(To clarify, there's no deficit of information on how to install and use the fglrx driver, but (a) that information doesn't really apply to arbitrary switching to "nameOfXdriver" which is information that'd be helpful in the future, and (b) I'd kinda like to try out the -radeonhd driver anyways.)

[Snowhog]

Re: How to tell what graphics driver is currently being used? How to switch?

K > Applications > System > Hardware Drivers doesn't identify it?

[KeithZG]

Re: How to tell what graphics driver is currently being used? How to switch?

K > Applications > System > Hardware Drivers doesn't identify it?

All it says is that "no proprietary drivers are in use on this system"...which, of course, I already know/assumed. Other than that, it seems bugged, and displays empty areas. A picture is worth a short essay:

[img width=323 height=400]http://www.ualberta.ca/~keithz/misc/jockey-kde--fail.jpeg[/img]

So . . . no, jockey-kde (ie. K > Applications > System > Hardware Drivers) doesn't identify it, haha. Man, I always have the weirdest problems.

[cristjc]

Re: How to tell what graphics driver is currently being used? How to switch?

You will not get an fglrx driver for your video. All pre-radeon2000 cards are now legacy - no longer supported by the ATI Proprietary drivers since the 9.3 release. You will have to stay with the open source radeon driver.

[KeithZG]

Re: How to tell what graphics driver is currently being used? How to switch?

You will not get an fglrx driver for your video. All pre-radeon2000 cards are now legacy - no longer supported by the ATI Proprietary drivers since the 9.3 release. You will have to stay with the open source radeon driver.

Well . . . yeah. I know. And I wouldn't want to use it anyways, as I already mentioned. But since there is some serious 2D graphical corruption going on (like random lines appearing at right-angles to the bottom of the mouse, buttons in Konqueror being blank white spaces when they aren't being hovered over, etc etc) I'd like to know what driver I am using, since just checking the xorg.conf file isn't an option anymore. I mean, hell, I could be running VESA for all I know (unlikely, but I only have conjectures, not proof).

And whatever driver I'm running, it isn't working well, so I'd like change that. Yes, yes, fglrx won't work; whatever. But the options are not just "proprietary blob or open source", there are several options in the open source world, at least for the hardware in question.

The two open source drivers tailored for the hardware (as opposed to less featured generic drivers like VESA) are X.org's Radeon and RadeonHD. Yes, these are different. I strongly suspect Kubuntu is, by default, choosing one of them (I believe the default is Radeon, ie. xf86-video-ati in X.org's parlance, xserver-xorg-video-ati being the Ubuntu/Debian meta-package and xserver-xorg-video-radeon the package actually being used). I would like to change that, and my first preference would be to try changing it to RadeonHD (ie. xf86-video-radeonhd, ie. xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd).

But, as aforementioned, I have no idea of how I'm supposed to do this short of creating an xorg.conf file from scratch to forcefully override however else X.org is determining which driver to use. But there must be some actual normal way I'm supposed to be doing this . . . right?

Sigh. I'm tempted to temporarily install the ubuntu-desktop metapackage and see if Ubuntu's GNOME install has any system tools for this. I swear the options existed in KDE3 at least, so it stands to reason that the Gets More Official Support version of *buntu would have this rather fundamental capability. Sigh. I don't mean to sound bitter, it's just that for Torvalds' sake choosing a graphics driver is something that an OS/DE should let me do!

[Melcar]

Re: How to tell what graphics driver is currently being used? How to switch?

Radeonhd is not installed by default, so either install it from the repos. or build it yourself (recommended):
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonHD

You will need to generate a fresh xorg.conf first. Stop X from running or simply boot into safe mode. At the command prompt do:

Xorg -configure

This drops xorg.conf.new into your root directory. Move the file to the correct location:

sudo mv /root/xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/

Open to edit it:

sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf.new

You can safely remove everything from that file. Just leave the Device section which is the one that interests us most. Find the Driver entry and make sure it's set to radeonhd. Save the file as xorg.conf and reboot. If you can't get into your graphical session for whatever reason, simply remove the file and Kubuntu will revert to its default settings next time you boot up:

sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf

[KeithZG]

Re: How to tell what graphics driver is currently being used? How to switch?

Thank you, Melcar! Very helpful And actually strangely reassuring to hear that, when in doubt, the xorg.conf file is still the recourse.

Alas, so far I can't seem to get it working (tried using the radeonhd driver in the repos, and then tried again using the one from 2009-10-30 in the "built from git" xorg-edgers drivers only ppa). As soon as X loads, the monitor blinks over to the amber light (ie. not receiving a signal). What looks like the relevant part of the Xorg log is:

(II) Setting vga for screen 0.
(==) RADEONHD(0): Depth 24, (--) framebuffer bpp 32
(**) RADEONHD(0): Selected EXA 2D acceleration.
(II) RADEONHD(0): Card not in database: 0x7183:0x17AF:0x3000; using generic modesetting.
	If - and only if - your card does not work or does not work optimally
	please contact [email]radeonhd@opensuse.org[/email] to help rectify this.
	Use the subject: 0x7183:0x17AF:0x3000: <name of board>
	and *please* describe the problems you are seeing
	in your message.
(--) RADEONHD(0): Detected an RV516 on an unidentified card
(II) RADEONHD(0): Mapped IO @ 0xd0200000 to 0xb7711000 (size 0x00010000)
(II) RADEONHD(0): PCIE Card Detected
(II) RADEONHD(0): Getting BIOS copy from legacy VBIOS location
(II) RADEONHD(0): ATOM BIOS Rom: 
	SubsystemVendorID: 0x17af SubsystemID: 0x3000
	IOBaseAddress: 0x3000
	Filename: PB4H02.00R 
	BIOS Bootup Message: 
113-00PB4H02-00R-HT X1550 256M\64B DVI-I\TV\DLDVI-I 400M\550E

lspci -v gives me the following info:

04:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV516 [Radeon X1300/X1550 Series]
    Subsystem: Hightech Information System Ltd. Device 3000
    Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 22
    Memory at e0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
    Memory at d0200000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
    I/O ports at 3000 [size=256]
    [virtual] Expansion ROM at d0220000 [disabled] [size=128K]
    Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2
    Capabilities: [58] Express Endpoint, MSI 00
    Capabilities: [80] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask- 64bit+ Queue=0/0 Enable-
    Kernel modules: radeon

04:00.1 Display controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV516 [Radeon X1300 Pro] (Secondary)
    Subsystem: Hightech Information System Ltd. Device 3001
    Flags: fast devsel
    Memory at d0210000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
    Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2
    Capabilities: [58] Express Endpoint, MSI 00

Is it just screwing up perhaps because it's an X1300 Pro and that's detecting as an unknown card? I've tried the entire xorg.conf file, and I've tried whittling it down to almost nothing; in both cases (and every step inbetween) having it say "radeon" works just fine, but trying "radeonhd" and there's no signal.

I've attached my entire Xorg.0.log file in case it helps at all . . .

[Melcar]

Re: How to tell what graphics driver is currently being used? How to switch?

Card not in database: 0x7183:0x17AF:0x3000; using generic modesetting.
If - and only if - your card does not work or does not work optimally
please contact radeonhd@opensuse.org to help rectify this.
Use the subject: 0x7183:0x17AF:0x3000: <name of board>
and *please* describe the problems you are seeing
in your message.

You can try doing that and see where it gets you. For the good of the hord, erm, community and all. Your card is being detected as far as I can tell; the drivers sometimes make complaints like that when they detect a non-reference boards or something similar.
Did you try setting it to use radeon instead? See if that works. That's the best driver right now anyway as far as features go:

The differences between radeon and radeonhd with r5xx-r7xx:

* radeon supports tear-free video playback
* radeon supports TV-out (experimental)
* radeonhd supports HDMI audio

http://www.x.org/wiki/radeon

[Rog131]

Re: How to tell what graphics driver is currently being used? How to switch?

Well . . . yeah. I know. And I wouldn't want to use it anyways, as I already mentioned. But since there is some serious 2D graphical corruption going on (like random lines appearing at right-angles to the bottom of the mouse, buttons in Konqueror being blank white spaces when they aren't being hovered over, etc etc) I'd like to know what driver I am using, since just checking the xorg.conf file isn't an option anymore.

From the Jaunty > Jaunty Jackalope Final Kubuntu Feedback:

Qt repaint bugs also seen in some situations using the open source ati driver; XAA fixes this in some cases. bug 350120

A bug report > Bug #350120: painting artifacts with qt4.5 on radeon chipset

It should (i think) be in the > Re: Karmic Release Schedule, Plans, KDE 4.3 - FINAL >> Karmic Koala Release Notes but the only marking with the Karmic is

Window corruption with older ATI graphics cards

With older ATI graphics cards with 32MB or less of video RAM some corruption of direct rendered windows, for example OSD notifier windows, might appear. This may be worked around by disabling 'RenderAccel' in the Xorg configuration. (426582)

A bit earlier > Topic: Help needed with xorg.conf and graphics driver

[Melcar]

Re: How to tell what graphics driver is currently being used? How to switch?

Switching to XAA acceleration should work then. Under your Device section in your xorg.conf just add:

Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"

You can try witching off "RenderAccel", but that will really make things slow.

[KeithZG]

Re: How to tell what graphics driver is currently being used? How to switch?

Eeep . . . if turning off RenderAccel really makes things slow it must be outright glacial; even merely switching to XAA acceleration has severely slowed things down. But that being said, it has definitely gotten rid of the painting artifacts (which were present even in OpenBox, but admittedly in OpenBox it was still using the KDE mouse pointer among other things).

That's probably good enough for now; the radeon driver using XAA wouldn't've been my first choice at all, but it does seem to work.

The computer in question isn't used terribly often, just a spare computer at my parents' place. Mostly it's just used when I'm over helping my sister with something involving computers (for example, at the moment I'm scanning and cropping some images for her while she works on a slideshow presentation). So a bit of slowness isn't the end of the world, and now I know for sure how to go about fiddling with what drivers are being used in an increasingly "ATI actually works on Linux!"-themed future. And I might drop a line to the radeonhd people too, even just so that they can add the revision to the list.

So, thank you everyone!