Hardware Support
Is my AMD/ATI board supported?
Many AMD/ATI boards (but not all) are supported by xorg-x11, at least for the
2D accelerated features. The 3D support is provided either by xorg-x11, or by
AMD's closed
source drivers. AMD's closed source driver only supports R600 and newer
GPUs. Older GPUs will use the mature open source xorg-x11 driver.
| GPU |
Common Name |
Support |
Rage128
Rage128
xorg
R100
Radeon7xxx, Radeon64
xorg
R200, R250, R280
Radeon8500, Radeon9000, Radeon9200
xorg
R300, R400
Radeon 9500 - X850
xorg
R500
Radeon X1300 - X1950
xorg
R600
RadeonHD 2000 series
xorg
RV670
RadeonHD 3000 series
xorg
RV770 (R700)
RadeonHD 4000 series
xorg
Evergreen
RadeonHD 5000 series
AMD DRI, xorg
Northern Islands
RadeonHD 6000 series
AMD DRI, xorg
Southern Islands
RadeonHD 7000 series
AMD DRI, xorg
The Radeon Feature Matrix
at x.org lists the open source driver support level for each part of the
graphics card hardware.
I have an All-In-Wonder/Vivo board. Are the multimedia features supported?
You don't need to use anything special for the board's multimedia features;
x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati will work just fine.
I'm not using an x86-based architecture. What are my options?
X11 support on the PPC or Alpha platforms is quite similar to x86 X11 support.
However, AMD/ATI's closed source Catalyst drivers are not supported on the PPC
or Alpha, so you will have to use the open source drivers. The Catalyst drivers
are only available for x86 and AMD64. The open source xorg-x11 drivers should
work well on all architectures.
To enable agpgart support for certain old AMD64 chipsets, you have to disable
support for the K8 IOMMU.
I have a laptop. Is my ATI Mobility model supported?
It should be, but you may have a configuration issue due to the OEM PCI id that
such chips may have. In such cases, you may have to write the configuration
file yourself.
Installation
Packages
There are two ways of getting drivers for your AMD/ATI card:
- The xorg-x11 ebuild provides the X11 implementation
-
The ati-drivers ebuild provides the AMD closed source X drivers
and kernel modules
If you want to use AMD/ATI's internal agpgart support instead of the Linux
kernel one, the agpgart driver and the chip set specific driver (in your kernel
configuration) must be built as modules or not at all.
Please read the Hardware Acceleration
Guide for more information on installing drivers for your AMD/ATI graphics
card.
Configuration
You may not need to manually create xorg.conf or modify it. Try
running without it first. You can also use the Xorg auto configuration option:
# X -configure
For more information on how to get a basic xorg.conf configuration file,
please refer to the Gentoo X Server
HowTo.
PPC, AMD64, and x86 users can use the xac stand-alone X configuration
tool by emerging x11-misc/xac, but isn't required.
You can use aticonfig if you have installed the ati-drivers
package.
If you're using ati-drivers, then you'll need to disable radeonfb
(and probably any other framebuffer drivers) in your kernel config, as it
conflicts with the built-in framebuffer in ati-drivers.
Switching to OpenGL
Once X is installed, configured, and running, it can use the AMD/ATI OpenGL
libraries:
# eselect opengl set ati