Arch Linux

eomanis

Member

Registered: 2013-04-17

Posts: 50

Arch amd64 with ATI Radeon HD6000 and radeon drivers, feasible?

Okay guys, your cards on the table please.

Has anyone here an Arch amd64 powered system with, say, an ATI Radeon HD6870 video card, using the free software radeon driver, that runs reliably enough to be used as your primary personal computer?

Because you see, since the HD6870 performs well on the phoronix.com benchmarks using the radeon driver, and there's dynamic power management available since recently, by now I have bought two of them (both used), and neither one works.

The first one, an ASUS EAH6870 HD6870 DirectCU, just freezes the system with a black screen as soon as KMS kicks in, and if left in that state the graphics card just becomes hotter and hotter.
The second one, a Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 6870 (11179-09-20G), sort of works, but the system rarely works longer than 30 minutes. After some time usually the screen goes black, or vertically striped with green stripes on black, and the system freezes.

By "system freezes" this also means that it is not possible to SSH into it anymore.
I am running the "stock" Arch linux kernel and Mesa/X stuff.

All I have right now are the Intel HD4000 internal graphics of the i5 Ivy Bridge processor, which started to show some minor corruption when Arch switched to SNA video acceleration, but at least does not crash.

This issue is starting to eat into my "new linux-powered primary PC to replace the WinXP box for good" budget, and before I buy a 3rd graphics card of that kind I would like to get confirmation that this hardware/software configuration is actually possible.
So my question is "Are the radeon drivers still too bugged for daily use, or do I just suck at procuring used graphics cards?"

If you have a HD6000 series graphics card running reliably with radeon, please tell me which manufacturer and model it is so I can try that model next.

Thank you very much in advance,
eomanis

EDIT:
Okay now, while I am here I can confess that this was a PEBCAK thing, and the Sapphire card has been running smoothly for about a year now.
I should have paid attention to my hardware, especially the motherboard. It only has a single x16 PCI-E slot, the others are missing about half their contact fins.
Turns out, if you use this x16 PCI-E slot for your graphics card, it miraculously starts working as intended *facepalm*
I used a wrong slot because the ASUS card does not fit there due to having a heat sink on its rear side.

Last edited by eomanis (2015-03-02 23:46:20)

Lone_Wolf

Forum Moderator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 11,965

Re: Arch amd64 with ATI Radeon HD6000 and radeon drivers, feasible?

Iomanus,

do the systems you use those cards on have any kind of built-in GPU  ?

From what i've seen, linux has problems with combining 2 different brands of GPU in 1 system.

Look in the bios / Uefi setup for an option to disable the integrated gpu, then try again.

Best would be to try the cards on a system with a cpu WITHOUT any integrated graphics.

---

Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

(A works at time B)  && (time C > time B ) ≠  (A works at time C)

eomanis

Member

Registered: 2013-04-17

Posts: 50

Re: Arch amd64 with ATI Radeon HD6000 and radeon drivers, feasible?

I looked into the BIOS/UEFI setup for an option to disable the CPU-integrated graphics, but there isn't anything beyond an option to specify the primary GPU to either "onboard" or "PCI Express", which I always switch to "PCI Express" when I add one of the graphics cards to the system.

Anyhow, since Mesa 10 came around some time ago I had another go at this today with the Sapphire. Unfortunately the freeze-after-some-uptime issue persists.

Hum. I guess I'll have to use the Intel HD4000 graphics then and try again with maybe an ATI HD7000 series graphics card in a few months or something