ati-catalyst 9.6 on kernel 2.6.30(x86) Crash!!

What video card and driver are you using?

I'm not positive about this, but, with the 2.6.30 kernels, weren't a lot of firmware drivers removed from the kernel? With the new kernel in Debian Sid, ATI users had to "apt-get install linux-firmware" in order to get their cards working. With linux-firmware some were able to make ATI drivers work, others still had problems.
This is why I stick with Nvidia. Their drivers may be closed source, but at least they make an attempt to have them working with recent linux kernels.

Alright, it seems a lot of people are curious about whether ATI catalyst driver 9.6 runs in F11, including me, I decided to give it another try - the first try was a failure when I tried to downgrade kernel to 2.6.27.24-170.2.68.fc10 directly. Now, the result of second try is out, it works.

That is, when you do the following steps. It is worth mentioning that there is absolutely NO guarantee that it will work in your system. If you want a stable system, I suggest a little more patience while playing with community driver, which in my opinion deserves praises, since it is getting better all the time.

My hardware specifications:
Athlon X2 7750 BE + DDR2-1066 2G x2 + Asrock 790GMH/128M + integrated graphics HD3300

OS: Fedora 11 x86_64

1) download fc10 kernel source rpm:
Code:

$wget http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/packages/kernel/2.6.27.24/170.2.68.fc10/src/kernel-2.6.27.24-170.2.68.fc10.src.rpm

2) rebuild 2.6.27.24 kernel for F11
Code:

$rpmbuild --rebuild kernel-2.6.27.24-170.2.68.fc10.src.rpm

note: keep it in mind, this step may take while and require about 7G disk space
3) install new kernel and kernel-devel packages
Code:

#yum localinstall kernel-2.6.27.24-170.2.68.fc11.x86_64.rpm kernel-devel-2.6.27.24-170.2.68.fc11.x86_64

note: you need to disable gpgcheck temporarily.
4) download ATI catalyst driver
Code:

$wget https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/ati-driver-installer-9-6-x86.x86_64.run

note: if you have a different chipset, choose what you need accordingly.
5) install ATI catalyst driver
Code:

#sh ati-driver-installer-9-6-x86.x86_64.run

6) check out xorg.conf file. If you don't have a /etc/X11/xorg.conf beforehand, I recommend create it before step 5 by:
Code:

#Xorg -configure :1
#cp ~/xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf

7) disable SELinux by append 'selinux=0' . Yeah, you have to do this, otherwise, at least in my box, it won't boot.
Code:

#sed -ie 's/\(kernel .*2.6.27.24-170.2.68.*\)/\1 selinux=0/' /boot/grub/grub.conf

8) reboot system, and good luck!
9) when you are tired of fglrx, or rpmfusion release fglrx rpms, you just need to do:
Code:

#cd /usr/share/ati
#./fgl_uninstall.sh
#yum remove kernel-2.6.27.24-170.2.68.fc11.x86_64.rpm kernel-devel-2.6.27.24-170.2.68.fc11.x86_64

then everything back on track again.

Known issues:
1) the alsa driver in kernel 2.6.27.24 is 1.0.17, so, if your audio card is not supported like mine, you'd better download alsa driver 1.0.20 and install it.
2) some system services may need to be manually enabled again.
3) the driver runs basically stable here, but I find the window minimize/maximize function does not work rightly. But I'm not sure whether it's a compiz problem or fglrx issue.

Ok, the difference of glxgears benchmark when using radeon or fglrx driver is quite noticable, about 330~360 fps (radeon) vs 2000~2900 fps (fglrx), although the difference of realtime performance aren't that different.

Another thing, when selinux is enabled, F11 won't boot, in my case, it hangs at system logger after auditd failed message. So, i whether it is a selinux conflict or audit daemon issue. I hope someone may give a hint here.

thanks.
Yes that is a nice idea but have you ever thought of going up to the biggest guy on the subway and telling him your thoughts on this. I wonder what he might do, or would you even do it.

wow gold

Hi,

A couple of things:

[ol]
[li]glxgears is NOT a benchmark, it doesn't really matter how much fps does it report as long as DRI is working, also, take into account that if your monitor refreshes the screen, let's say, 60 times per second, it doesn't really matter how much fps your card can do, your monitor will not magically be able to output 3200 frames per second, period.[/li]
[li]fglrx (catalyst, or whatever you call them) DO NOT WORK officially with anything above 2.6.28.10, which is the latest .28 release of the linux kernel. 2.6.29 and 2.6.30 releases are plainly unsupported. This holds valid for fglrx 9.6 and 9.7. Yes, I am perfectly aware that there are patches around to make them kind-of-work with newer kernels, but if you use them expect all kind of annoyances (spam logs which will fill your /var/ partition, hangs, lockups, acpi stuff not working, etc etc etc), you get the idea. Of course, the magically work for *some* persons, which doesn't mean they truly work at all.[/li]
[/ol]

So, to sum up: if you truly need the propietary fglrx driver, the best idea is to stay at linux 2.6.28.x.