The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

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On the topic of GPU acceleration, has anyone checked out:

I haven't followed the guide yet. But not having to pass-trough your GPU, but still get acceleration on windows is pretty cool.

I refuse to run windows on bare-metal, and I don't have the hardware for pass-through.
 
Run lspci, check if your drivers are loaded, and check your X logs.
The drivers are loaded but GPU acceleration does not work
1728993703832.png
You can't expect a modern operating system to work seamlessly with a machine from 2003.
Would a Prescott system from 2004 be modern enough for Gentoo?
 
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Support probably got dropped from newer mesa:

Deprecated Systems and Drivers​

In the past there were other drivers for older GPUs and operating systems. These have been removed from the Mesa source tree and distribution. If anyone’s interested though, the code can be found in the Git repo. The list includes:
  • 3dfx Glide
  • 3DLABS Gamma
  • ATI Mach 64
  • ATI Rage 128
  • ATI Radeon 7000 - 9250
  • DEC OpenVMS
  • Intel i810
  • Intel i830 - i865
  • Linux Framebuffer
  • Matrox
  • MS-DOS
  • NVIDIA Riva TNT - GeForce 4
  • S3 Savage
  • Silicon Integrated Systems
  • swrast
  • VIA Unichrome
Edit:
There is a mention of Mesa-7.2 and 9250 on https://sourceforge.net/p/mesa3d/mailman/mesa3d-dev/thread/49F9A1EB.2060907@vmware.com/
And no, gentoo does not have that version anymore.
 
Last edited:
Sounds as if the kernel isn't happy about something so the DDX (Xorg) driver can't use the GPU, maybe dmesg logs would suggest as to why
Installed the prebuilt distribution kernel because the one I configured apparently does not have dmesg
1729011892979.png
GPU acceleration does not work still
 
Installed the prebuilt distribution kernel because the one I configured apparently does not have dmesg
View attachment 6526561
GPU acceleration does not work still
Hmm kernel looks fine then, I assume the issue is between Xorg then...

"GPU accel disabled or not working, using shadowfb for KMS" seems to get printed when the following code check fails:

C:
    if (!xf86ReturnOptValBool(info->Options, OPTION_ACCEL, TRUE) ||
    (!RADEONIsAccelWorking(pScrn))) {
    xf86DrvMsg(pScrn->scrnIndex, X_INFO,
           "GPU accel disabled or not working, using shadowfb for KMS\n");

And RADEONIsAccelWorking looks like this:

C:
static Bool RADEONIsAccelWorking(ScrnInfoPtr pScrn)
{
    RADEONEntPtr pRADEONEnt = RADEONEntPriv(pScrn);
    RADEONInfoPtr info = RADEONPTR(pScrn);
    struct drm_radeon_info ginfo;
    int r;
    uint32_t tmp;

    memset(&ginfo, 0, sizeof(ginfo));
    if (info->dri2.pKernelDRMVersion->version_minor >= 5)
    ginfo.request = RADEON_INFO_ACCEL_WORKING2;
    else
    ginfo.request = RADEON_INFO_ACCEL_WORKING;
    ginfo.value = (uintptr_t)&tmp;
    r = drmCommandWriteRead(pRADEONEnt->fd, DRM_RADEON_INFO, &ginfo, sizeof(ginfo));
    if (r) {
        /* If kernel is too old before 2.6.32 than assume accel is working */
        if (r == -EINVAL) {
            xf86DrvMsg(pScrn->scrnIndex, X_INFO, "Kernel too old missing accel "
                       "information, assuming accel is working\n");
            return TRUE;
        }
        return FALSE;
    }
    if (info->ChipFamily == CHIP_FAMILY_HAWAII) {
        if (tmp == 2 || tmp == 3)
            return TRUE;
    } else if (tmp) {
        return TRUE;
    }
    return FALSE;
}

tl;dr either your Xorg config is fucked, you have a permissions issue (i.e. rootless Xorg can cause this) or some Xorg modules aren't being loaded.
 
It's using the defaults

Does running everything as root also cause these issues? I don't have any user accounts
Don't think running as root would cause that

As a last resort I suggest trying an older LTS kernel (4.19/4.14 or something like that) and if that doesn't work then I have no clue what could be causing it.

Otherwise I would suggest using Windows XP as mentioned above or older as Linux sucks with legacy graphics, a quick google has people mentioning that the r200 driver is troublesome on Linux anyways.
 
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Installed the prebuilt distribution kernel because the one I configured apparently does not have dmesg
View attachment 6526561
GPU acceleration does not work still
Just a tip from my own messing around configuring my own kernel for Gentoo over the last few weeks. Not so much to help with this specific issue since idk what's going on with yours.

Is installing the binary version of the kernel booting into it. Using the program they recommend to save all the modules that loaded and use that to configure the kernel for you. Then you can just open the config with your choice of kernel config tool like menu config or xconfig change a few options if you need to. Save that config into /etc/portage/savedconfig. Then re emerge the dist-kernel making sure the savedconfig use flag is enabled.

They go over it more I depth in the handbook if you want to try doing it this way. But basically it lets you use a completely custom kernel, but it does all the work installing it for you. To me this is the best option.
 
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