Bug 7346

Summary:	fglrx-legacy support for older ATI cards can/should be added
Product:	Mageia	Reporter:	Joseph Wang <joequant>
Component:	New RPM package request	Assignee:	Anssi Hannula <anssi.hannula>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:
Severity:	major
Priority:	Normal	CC:	andras.salamon, mageia, thierry.vignaud, tmb
Version:	Cauldron
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
URL:	http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTExMzU
Whiteboard:
Source RPM:		CVE:
Status comment:

Description Joseph Wang 2012-09-04 16:21:36 CEST

Description of problem:

The ATI has released a new package with support for legacy ATI 4250 cards.

Mandrake Cooker has an SRPM with this driver

http://pkgs.org/mandriva-cooker/mandriva-nonfree-release-i586/dkms-fglrx-legacy-8.97.100.3-1-mdv2012.0.i586.rpm.html

and the RPM's mostly work on cauldron.

I am interested in using ati cards for opencl programming and so I would be
willing to tweak the cooker packages to work with cauldron if there is interest.


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):


How reproducible:


Steps to Reproduce:
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Comment 1 Joseph Wang 2012-09-04 16:22:33 CEST

BTW, I have gotten the driver to run on my machine.  There is a patch that has to be applied for linux 3.5

Thierry Vignaud 2012-09-04 17:28:32 CEST

CC: (none) => thierry.vignaud
Assignee: bugsquad => anssi.hannula

Comment 2 Joseph Wang 2012-09-04 18:14:47 CEST

On second thought it might not be worth the trouble.  I was interested in getting fglrx to work because of the opencl drivers.  Those don't seem to work, and it may be better to just drop the fglrx driver and let me figure out how to get the open source opencl to work.

BTW, I'm interested in packaging scientific and high performance computing apps.  I'd like to get in contact with someone so that if I get the opencl drivers to work, I can push them to the main distribution.

Comment 3 claire robinson 2012-09-04 18:46:58 CEST

Have a read here Joseph, we're still short of packagers, you'd be very welcome.

https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Becoming_a_Mageia_Packager

Comment 4 Martin Whitaker 2012-12-22 12:51:43 CET

There's another reason to support fglrx on older ATI cards - it has much better power management than the X.org radeon driver. For example, my notebook running Mageia-2 + fglrx has a power consumption when idle of 18.3W. When switching to Mageia-3 beta 1 + radeon, with dynamic power management enabled, it has a power consumption when idle of 21.5W. This is enough to force the fan to run continuously, which makes it unusable in a quiet room.

CC: (none) => mageia

Comment 5 Thomas Backlund 2012-12-23 00:01:04 CET

Well, the problem is not adding fglrx-legavy as such, but the last legacy driver Amd has released is 12.6:
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/legacy/Pages/legacy-radeon_linux.aspx

But that driver does not support x11-server 1.13 that is currently in Cauldron, so the only thing to do for now is to complain to Amd and hope they will release an update.

CC: (none) => tmb

Andras Salamon 2012-12-30 20:40:36 CET

CC: (none) => andras.salamon

Comment 6 Anssi Hannula 2013-04-28 22:31:23 CEST

As noted in comment #5, there is no fglrx driver for the older cards that supports X server 1.13, so closing as WONTFIX.

If the situation changes and AMD releases such a driver, that can then be added to Mageia.

Status: NEW => RESOLVED
Resolution: (none) => WONTFIX