[5953] in Release_7.7_team
Re: libGL.so graphics problem on Dell 745s
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (andrew m. boardman)
Fri Apr 11 15:46:16 2008
Message-Id: <200804111945.m3BJjc76018547@pothole.mit.edu>
To: Alex T Prengel <alexp@MIT.EDU>
cc: bugs@MIT.EDU, release-team@MIT.EDU, wdc@MIT.EDU, jdreed@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 08 Apr 2008 17:30:58 EDT."
<200804082130.m38LUwCY023719@prevert.mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:45:38 -0400
From: "andrew m. boardman" <amb@MIT.EDU>
X-Spam-Flag: NO
X-Spam-Score: 0.00
> There seems to be something wrong with libGL.so (specifically,
> /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.so.1.2 and /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.fgl.so.1.2) on
> Dell 745's that breaks 3d graphics.
Other applications that use 3d graphics (glxgears for the trivial case)
do work with the current set of drivers, but I still think this is almost
certainly due to the aftermarket GL drivers that we install to enable
hardware acceleration on the newer ATI-equipped Dell machines.
While the ATI drivers are in a state of active development and the
problem in question may be due to an already-fixed bug, there's a whole
raft of compatability problems with varying levels of hardware, software,
and usage resolutions. In particular, when preparing the last release, I
noticed that the newest version of the fglrx driver broke completely with
some of our hardware, despite having some useful bug fixes. (Quite
possibly including one for this.) If there's an fglrx release that fixes
the problem, it may be possible to asynchronously add it to the release,
since the fglrx drivers are updated from AFS at boot time.
If you have some time to dig into the problem more, you can try
installing the full fglrx driver package; there are some rpms in
/afs/dev/user/amb/fglrx, including:
fglrx_6_8_0-8.433-1.i386.rpm: what we're currently using; presumably this
won't work but if the subset of files Athena installs is missing
something it might.
fglrx_6_8_0-8.471-1.i386.rpm: current driver release; untested by me.
The corresponding installers from which the rpms above were built are
also there; see:
http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/linux/linux-radeon.html
...for more on what's what, including a link to previous versions.
Thanks for the very complete bug report. I'll be digging into this more,
but unfortunately not immediately, since there's a lot of high-priority
work around ISDA right now, my Athena allocation is part-time at best,
and installer update work is #1 on that list.
