OS and Software > All Things Unix > ATI Linux Catalyst drivers

ATI Linux Catalyst drivers

I have gotten very good service from the ATI Catalyst driver on several distros for the past 15 months or so. That said, I recently switched to a distro that does not support it, so I've had to go with the open source radeon driver.

Tim
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"Life is like this long line, except at the end there ain't no merry-go-round." - Arthur on The King of Queens
~ Project Hope ~

Good to know, I'm planning on sticking with Ubuntu and derivs in the foreseable future, so I'll assume Catalyst will be availble on most of these.

How would you rate Catalyst versus the priprietary Nvidia driver?
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reply to El Quintron

Thank you for letting me know, I've always used nvidia, and will until this card lives out its useful life, but I was previously under the impression that nvidia was the way to go with Linux, it's nice the know I can get an ATI card next time around and not have to fiddle too much.
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reply to El Quintron

reply to El Quintron
On Debian sid, which is what I'm running, there is no good way (maybe no way) to install the proprietary fglrx driver. So, I am using the open source radeon driver.

The radeon driver works very well except for power control. fglrx uses dynamic power control, meaning it only goes into the high power mode when called for by the workload. radeon in "default" mode runs at high power all the time, making the card run very hot, about 15-20 C hotter than fglrx. Therefore, I have to set the mode to "low" to keep the temps down, but it cannot switch to higher levels when needed.

There is a "dynamic" setting, but it still always runs on high with that setting. I verified with the developers that "dynamic" does not work. They plan it for "the future".

So, use fglrx if the distro you choose allows it.

Tim
--
"Life is like this long line, except at the end there ain't no merry-go-round." - Arthur on The King of Queens
~ Project Hope ~

Is fglrx the same as Catalyst?

reply to timcuth
Dear friends,

I am not sure why the driver would be distro dependent - there is a downloadable installer available on the ati website, although god knows the current one is hard to find, as were it a national security issue.

All that having been said, my experience of ten years with ati cards and drivers has always been at least not negative, most of the time positive.

There is one caveat, and that is to check before running the installer that the current driver works with the specific xorg and kernel. Also, the distro binaries are not always carefully matched when people using distros like mint or ubuntu update, so one must always update manually to avoid version conflicts. Caution using "grab everything from upstream" via apt-get is part of life with debian.

Peace,
M
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Life is a series of return dates. There is but one final argument, its eloquence determines who we were, and whether who we were had meaning.

I didn't really understand, either. However, I had conversations with the guy in Arch Linux who keeps fglrx working with the kernels and I know for a fact he patches the driver to keep it working. I spoke with the developers of my current distro several times with the question, "If it works in Arch, why can't it work in Siduction?" Their answer was that if the vanilla driver doesn't work with the current kernel, too bad - just use the open source driver.

Also, the Debian Wiki says that fglrx does not currently work with sid.

So, what I gather from all this is that Arch (and Ubuntu and Sabayon) make an effort to make fglrx work with their kernels, while Siduction and Debian do not.

Tim
--
"Life is like this long line, except at the end there ain't no merry-go-round." - Arthur on The King of Queens
~ Project Hope ~

It has a lot to do with Xorg server as well.

Nice read: »wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI_Catalyst

BUT, the great thing about Arch is how transparent everything is... so how does Arch get the installer to work!?!?

»aur.archlinux.org/packages/ca/ca···PKGBUILD

That is the magic.

So we have a download from Arch for an ati_make and a makefile_compat and the driver itself from AM... Ubuntu???

»launchpad.net/ubuntu/quantal/+so···ubuntu1/

Hmmmm.... So the driver itself is patched/worked/maintained by Canonical. Ubuntu is a Debian distro... this should be able to be broken down and installed on Siduction.

The Arch linux make file was altered:

said by Vi0L0 :

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it is ati's code from their make.sh file, modified a bit to fit our arch linux system, used inside PKGBUILD

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quote:

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--- 10.10/common/lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/Makefile 2010-09-22 09:15:33.000000000 +0200
+++ 10.10/common/lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/Makefile 2010-10-01 17:57:21.057820899 +0200
@@ -66,6 +66,7 @@
-DFGL_GART_RESERVED_SLOT \
-DFGL_LINUX253P1_VMA_API \
-DPAGE_ATTR_FIX=$(PAGE_ATTR_FIX) \
+ -DCOMPAT_ALLOC_USER_SPACE=$(COMPAT_ALLOC_USER_SPACE) \

ifeq ($(KERNELRELEASE),)
# on first call from remote location we get into this path

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