NOTE: Do Not Use these packages anymore. Fedora 12 will ship with the new drivers and include mesa-lib-drm-experimental. Use the official packages instead!
This may void your warranty!
In Fedora 11, newer Radeon HD cards don’t get a lot of love. The open source drivers only support 2d on the HD 3000 series and the HD 4000 series are out of luck. To bring further agony, ATI’s proprietary fglrx driver doesn’t work in Fedora 11 since they haven’t fixed their driver to work with newer kernels.
In April, ATI released the specs of these chipsets to the open source community and X.Org has been hard at work. The support for these cards remains experimental to date, and this branch has not yet been implemented in Fedora.
This evening, I compiled the source for the experimental branch which offers 3d support for these newer model Radeon HD series cards. I emphasize experimental, and I make no claims about how awesome the drivers are.
Also, because it overwrites two kernel modules (radeon.ko and drm.ko) it conflicts with the kernel package, so you must use –replacefiles in rpm to install it. (This problem has been fixed). After this is done, the mesa rpm, compiled against the experimental branch, installs with no problem. And glxgears worked for me after :-).
I have the source, specs, and compiled RPMs for i586 and x86_64 at http://vwbusguy.fedorapeople.org/radeon-r6xx-r7xx/f11/.
You will need both the driver and the mesa package to enjoy all the 3d stuffs. Again, experimental – use at your own risk.
Faith and Freedom 
[…] ati drivers do not currently support the Radeon HD 3xxx or 4xxx series cards yet, but that is also expected to change very soon. For now, I have downgraded this laptop to Fedora 10 until ATI or the open source community picks […]
By: Review: Fedora 11 « Faith and Freedom on July 11, 2009
at 3:23 am
[…] original here: Free open Source drivers for newer Radeon HD cards « Faith and Freedom This entry was posted on Saturday, July 11th, 2009 at 3:05 am and is filed under Linux, News, […]
By: Free open Source drivers for newer Radeon HD cards « Faith and Freedom | Open Hacking on July 11, 2009
at 5:10 am
Why is the “HD 4000 series out of luck” for 2d?
I own a HD 4850 and that runs perfectly fine with fast 2D right out of the box with no additional configuration whatsoever on my 1920×1200 display.
Yes, there’s no 3D support but if you don’t need that then the HD 4000 series is a very good fit for Fedora 11. No compilations needed.
By: Dennis J on July 11, 2009
at 6:04 am
Dennis,
Are you running the radeon driver or vesa? In Fedora 11, the generic vesa driver offers some support for the 4000 series, but the results of that have been very buggy here (as I noted here).
By: vwbusguy on July 11, 2009
at 11:37 am
My system uses the radeon driver. Here are some lines from my xorg logfile:
(–) RADEON(0): Chipset: “ATI Radeon 4800 Series” (ChipID = 0x9442)
(WW) RADEON(0): R600 support is mostly incomplete and very experimental
…
(II) RADEON(0): [dri] Found DRI library version 1.3.0 and kernel module version 1.30.0
…
(II) RADEON(0): [DRI] installation complete
(II) RADEON(0): [drm] Added 32 65536 byte vertex/indirect buffers
(II) RADEON(0): [drm] Mapped 32 vertex/indirect buffers
(II) RADEON(0): [drm] dma control initialized, using IRQ 19
(II) RADEON(0): [drm] Initialized kernel GART heap manager, 29884416
…
(II) RADEON(0): Direct rendering enabled
(II) RADEON(0): Setting EXA maxPitchBytes
(II) RADEON(0): Acceleration enabled
(II) RADEON(0): DPMS enabled
(==) RADEON(0): Silken mouse enabled
(II) RADEON(0): Set up textured video
I don’t see any instability or glitches at all.
By: Dennis J on July 12, 2009
at 5:54 am
Thank you, Thank you, Thank you so very much! I’ve been meaning to do this but with work and the fact that my motherboard is now in the shop waiting to be replaced I couldn’t do it but as soon as it comes back I’ll test these packages.
By: Dextro on July 11, 2009
at 7:01 am
[…] more from the original source: Free open Source drivers for newer Radeon HD cards « Faith and Freedom Tagged as: are-out, cards-don, check-the-latest, coupon-codes, drivers-only, fedora, […]
By: Free open Source drivers for newer Radeon HD cards « Faith and Freedom » » Free Online Press on July 11, 2009
at 7:06 am
[…] See more here: Free open Source drivers for newer Radeon HD cards « Faith and Freedom […]
By: IT BLOG - Free open Source drivers for newer Radeon HD cards « Faith and Freedom on July 11, 2009
at 8:10 am
> Also, because it overwrites two kernel modules (radeon.ko and drm.ko) it conflicts with the kernel package, so you must use –replacefiles in rpm to install it.
That means your packaging is incorrect. You should define your moduledir to /lib/modules/%{kversion}-%{krelease}.%{_target_cpu}/updates, not /lib/modules/%{kversion}-%{krelease}.%{_target_cpu}/kernel, then the modules will replace the ones from the kernel cleanly.
By: Kevin Kofler on July 11, 2009
at 11:39 am
Kevin,
Thanks! I’ll revise my spec, re-compile, and post.
~Scott
By: vwbusguy on July 11, 2009
at 12:26 pm
I have changed them to go to updates instead of kernel folder.
By: vwbusguy on July 11, 2009
at 12:43 pm
Hmmm…
The kernel module no longer conflicts, but the mesa rpm conflicts with mesa-dri-drivers, mesa-libGL, mesa-libGLU, and freeglut.
When I tried to install anyway with the –replacefiles option the x86_64 version of the package gave an error saying that CPIO read failed. Apparently the package is corrupted somehow.
Anyway, just rebuilt from your source and installed. About to restart X now and hope for the best.
Thanks!
By: Sean on July 11, 2009
at 5:14 pm
Sean,
I’ll check it out. It worked here without any errors in my test environment. the mesa packages are listed in Obsoletes” in spec and shouldn’t conflict. I’ll make sure the package didn’t get corrupted in the upload.
~Scott
By: vwbusguy on July 11, 2009
at 6:24 pm
I’ve uploaded new RPMs. Should work fine now for both.
By: vwbusguy on July 11, 2009
at 9:33 pm
Not being able to install fglrx is stopping me from installing fedora 11, but not because of 3D but power management in my laptop. Does this development version already supports power management?
By: amrlima on July 12, 2009
at 5:16 pm
I would check http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/drm/log/?h=r6xx-r7xx-3d for what all might work/not work. I grabbed the source on July 10th, 2009.
By: vwbusguy on July 12, 2009
at 9:31 pm
[…] […]
By: ãÈÑæß ÈÑíÞ Ããá Ýí ÊÚÑíÝÇÊ ati radeon hd - ãÌÊãÚ áíäæßÓ ÇáÚÑÈí on July 13, 2009
at 11:02 am
[…] Lo más destacado del articulo es que ya le funciono el glxgears, con unos paquetes que el mismo compilo con paquetes aun EXPERIMENTELES y creo sus rpm. Si quieres ver el artÃculo completo, les dejo el link: […]
By: Nuevos Drivers ATI Radeon HD en Fedora 11 « tuxlight on July 14, 2009
at 4:05 pm
Hi,
So if I well understood, to test expermental 3d, I just have to install the 2 packages you made, right ?
But what should my Xorg looks like ?
And do I have to run the kernel without KMS (nomodeset) or it doesn’t matter ?
By: Ethan on July 15, 2009
at 12:27 pm
Yes. Install the radeon-r6xx-r7xx and radeon-r6xx-r7xx-mesa. If you are not currently using the radeon driver you can set this with system-config-display. If you are, all you need to do is reboot.
This will replace the the current radeon driver and current mesa with added components for the new cards. Seems to uninstall cleanly and after uninstalling you can go back to using stock Fedora mesa.
As far as kernel modesetting, it may or may not work. Might be good to check out: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/Common#Miscellaneous_problems_with_ATI_.2F_AMD_graphics_adapters if you run into any problems.
By: vwbusguy on July 15, 2009
at 1:07 pm
Thanks for help but I tried to install and apparently I have a depedency problem.
The output of the “sudo yum install” asks for libs in 64b although my system is i586 !!
here are some of the errors :
radeon-r6xx-r7xx-mesa-7.6-1.fc11.i586 from /radeon-r6xx-r7xx-mesa-7.6-1.fc11.i586 has depsolving problems
–> Missing Dependency: libc.so.6()(64bit) is needed by package radeon-r6xx-r7xx-mesa-7.6-1.fc11.i586 (/radeon-r6xx-r7xx-mesa-7.6-1.fc11.i586)
radeon-r6xx-r7xx-mesa-7.6-1.fc11.i586 from /radeon-r6xx-r7xx-mesa-7.6-1.fc11.i586 has depsolving problems
–> Missing Dependency: libstdc++.so.6(CXXABI_1.3)(64bit) is needed by package radeon-r6xx-r7xx-mesa-7.6-1.fc11.i586 (/radeon-r6xx-r7xx-mesa-7.6-1.fc11.i586)
radeon-r6xx-r7xx-mesa-7.6-1.fc11.i586 from /radeon-r6xx-r7xx-mesa-7.6-1.fc11.i586 has depsolving problems
–> Missing Dependency: libpthread.so.0()(64bit) is needed by package radeon-r6xx-r7xx-mesa-7.6-1.fc11.i586 (/radeon-r6xx-r7xx-mesa-7.6-1.fc11.i586)
radeon-r6xx-r7xx-mesa-7.6-1.fc11.i586 from /radeon-r6xx-r7xx-mesa-7.6-1.fc11.i586 has depsolving problems
Should I install other packages before the two you compile ?
By: Ethan on July 15, 2009
at 3:40 pm
Same problem as Ethan
By: Letmeable on July 18, 2009
at 11:04 am
Recompiling the src.rpm (rpmbuild –rebuild radeon-r6xx-r7xx-mesa-.src.rpm) will work. I will recompile it in a 32-bit VM this weekend and update it. I’ll add a comment here when that is finished.
Also, if I have time, I’ll work on a way to make these drivers more kernel independent to be more friendly to both Fedora users and for users of other distros.
Also, if anyone sees any ways I can improve these packages further, please let me know :-).
By: vwbusguy on July 18, 2009
at 11:47 am
Hi everybody.
I succeed in installing the two packages, but it seems that something is not working.
this is the output of glxinfo:
name of display: :0.0
Mesa: CPU vendor: GenuineIntel
Mesa: CPU name: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T5550 @ 1.83GHz
Mesa: MMX cpu detected.
Mesa: SSE cpu detected.
Mesa: Not testing OS support for SSE, leaving enabled.
Mesa: Mesa 7.2 DEBUG build Jul 18 2009 18:35:54
Mesa warning: couldn’t open libtxc_dxtn.so, software DXTn compression/decompression unavailable
display: :0 screen: 0
direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.2
server glx extensions:
GLX_ARB_multisample, GLX_EXT_visual_info, GLX_EXT_visual_rating,
GLX_EXT_import_context, GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap, GLX_OML_swap_method,
GLX_SGI_make_current_read, GLX_SGIS_multisample, GLX_SGIX_hyperpipe,
GLX_SGIX_swap_barrier, GLX_SGIX_fbconfig, GLX_MESA_copy_sub_buffer
client glx vendor string: SGI
client glx version string: 1.4
client glx extensions:
I’m on fedora 11, my kernel 2.6.29.
By: Letmeable on July 19, 2009
at 1:04 am
Thanks for this… the radeon crowd salutes you 🙂
By: Stelios on July 21, 2009
at 5:22 pm
Hi I tried to recompile the mesa package as you said but I was missing the following packages : expat-devel, libXmu-devel
so maybe you can add those to the build-requiries of the SPEC file.
Also when I tried to install that package I have the error :
Running rpm_check_debug
ERROR with rpm_check_debug vs depsolve:
libGL-devel is needed by (installed) qt-devel-1:4.5.2-1.fc11.i586
libGLU-devel is needed by (installed) qt-devel-1:4.5.2-1.fc11.i586
Complete!
(1, [u’Please report this error in http://yum.baseurl.org/report'%5D)
What can I do ?
By: Ethan on July 22, 2009
at 1:03 pm
Get dep. problems:
Transaktionskontrollfel:
file /usr/lib64/dri/radeon_dri.so from install of mesa-dri-drivers-7.6-0.1.fc11.x86_64 conflicts with file from package radeon-r6xx-r7xx-mesa-7.6-1.fc11.x86_64
file /usr/lib64/dri/swrast_dri.so from install of mesa-dri-drivers-7.6-0.1.fc11.x86_64 conflicts with file from package radeon-r6xx-r7xx-mesa-7.6-1.fc11.x86_64
file /usr/lib64/libGL.so.1.2 from install of mesa-libGL-7.6-0.1.fc11.x86_64 conflicts with file from package radeon-r6xx-r7xx-mesa-7.6-1.fc11.x86_64
Im new to rpm, installed the rpm’s with “rpm -Uvh *”
By: Anders on August 1, 2009
at 8:10 pm
in several threads i read about installing an ati card on fc12. first i install AMD original driver but x window did not start and system hangs and i can not use shell to remove driver so i install fedora again and install mesa drivers from updates of fedora, made a reboot and x don’t starts again. whats wrong?
btw i am using ATI mobility radeon HD 4300 on DELL Inspiron 1564 with fc12-32bit
By: Mehdi on March 31, 2010
at 12:05 pm
For f12 there is pretty decent support from the foss drivers. Install tje mesa-dri-drivers-experimental package for better 3d support.
By: vwbusguy on April 7, 2010
at 12:31 pm