No hardware rendering on following machine: Phenom II 820 quad core Asus Radeon HD4850 video card 4 GB memory M4A77T /USB3 mainboard Freebsd 8.2 / AMD64 release /etc/X11/xorg.conf generated by Xorg -configure and following lines added: Section "DRI" Mode 0666 EndSection glxinfo output as root or limited user: direct rendering: Yes .... OpenGL renderer string: Software Rasterizer Although direct rendering is enabled, the video driver uses software rendering.
Responsible Changed From-To: freebsd-amd64->freebsd-x11 make this a ports PR and assign.
State Changed From-To: open->suspended This is a known issue and will not be fixed untill the ATI KMS work is integrated into FreeBSD.
This is a very puzzling problem that really irks me. I had perfectly working R600 DRI on very similar hardware (HD4870) as well as a laptop with similar video (HD4200), but some Xorg update at least a year ago killed it. Why the regression without any apparent attempt to fix? The last it worked properly was the point in time when setting WITHOUT_NOVEAU allowed r600_dri.so to be compiled. All worked perfect and the newer Xorg brings no new features from a user point of view, only new problems. I could almost understand if there was some actual problem with the R600 DRI, but there isn't. Starting X results in the software rasterizer, which makes KDE painfully slow . However, running certain apps I get hardware rendering. i.e. OpenArena loads r600_dri.so instead of swrast and the framerate in timedemo clearly slows hardware rendering is in fact working. Why can a game get hardware rendering but the rest of X can't? Considering how far off KMS support is, I would hope this issue would have been addressed by now. From my viewpoint, it looks like some stupid and likely trivial bug that causes Xorg to load swrast instead of r600_dri, but I haven't the time nor patience to dig through the mess that is Xorg to attempt to figure it out. Considering the recent suggestion of flipping the WITH_NEW_XORG switch, which itself is very ambiguous, I must re-iterate a previous suggestion: Instead of having a single set of ports for Xorg, PLEASE make some versioned ports for the older versions. This would allow the "legacy" hardware (as in what I think most of us are actually using) to continue to function in a useful fashion. Considering the precedent of version-named ports (e.g. postgresql, mysql, bdb, etc), I cannot fathom why this is not done for Xorg/DRI/Mesa.
Hi! I don't consider your card as "old hardware". I believe it's supported by the new kernel driver available in FreeBSD 9.3 and 10.0 and later. And Mesa 10.3.0, committed one or two weeks ago, works way better than Mesa 7.6 or 9.1. In the end, your card should perform better with the new drivers and ports. Do you still have this problem today? To answer your question regarding the usage of versioned ports, we couldn't do this because xserver, Mesa and libdrm are dependencies of many other ports. And the Ports tree has no facility to say "This port depends on libGL, no matter the version". This feature is planned but meanwhile, the graphics ports behind WITH_NEW_XORG are now enabled by default and this flag is being removed.
The Radeon kernel driver is now quite stable for many people and Radeon HD4850 is reported to work.