3D support for the ATI Rage (Mach64)
Sun Oct 13 01:31:21 EDT 2002
I've found lots of info on getting 3D acceleration to work on this
Dell Latitude CPx H500GT laptop under Linux. (almost) all of it says
it can't be done with current versions of XFree86. But I discovered
very recent drivers, got it to work, and want to share my experiences
for others in my position.
The short version: You need
the latest ATI Mach64
drivers.
Everything else about these laptops seems to be sufficiently covered
on
linux-laptop.net.
The long version:
I'm running the Testing / Sarge release of Debian Linux, with a custom
compiled Linux 2.4.19 kernel.
I have a Dell Latitude CPx H500GT.
Relevant lspci output:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage
Mobility P/M AGP 2x (rev 64)
Before attempting to get 3D acceleration to work, I had XFree86 4.1.0
working fine unaccelerated. This worked pretty much automatically, except
for changes to the mouse config mentioned at the bottom of this page.
I found
the latest ATI
Mach64 drivers, and attempted to install them (run install.sh).
The first problem I had was the fact that the Debian Testing X
packages are currently 4.1.0. It took me a while to notice the X output
was telling me that these new drivers were built against XFree86 4.2.0,
and weren't going to work with 4.1.0.
To get 3D acceleration to work, I installed (only) the
xserver-xfree86
package from Debian Unstable/Sid (v4.2.1-2). I was rather shocked
that it didn't have any dependency issues with the rest of my Debian
Testing/Sarge packages.
I then installed a
bleeding edge
binary snapshot of the mach64 drivers (20021012). (Run install.sh)
I started X, and acceleration worked just fine (I actually tested with
armagetron, set on the
lowest detail settings - when you start a game, it shows you the FPS,
but the difference is noticeable enough from menus).
I noticed from lsmod that the driver install script had inserted the
agpgart and mach64 kernel modules, so I put them in my /etc/modules to
be loaded automatically on bootup, and rebooted.
Didn't work. Turns out I had them loading in the wrong order -
agpgart needs to load before mach64.
All works beautifully now. Much thanks to the driver author, Leif
Delgass (I've emailed him).
I tried looking in syslog output for errors which might indicate
what I could alias to the agpgart / mach64 modules, so they could be
appropriately dynamically loaded, but I didn't see anything, so I had to
make them load on startup. Is there a more appropriate way to do this ?
The only modifications I made to the default /etc/X11/XF86Config were
related to my mouse:
Option "Device" "/dev/gpmdata" # Only necessary with gpm.
Option "Protocol" "PS/2"
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