fglrx

External resources

	Wikipedia

	Gentoo doc

AMD Catalyst (previous fglrx: FireGL and Radeon for X ) is the proprietary graphics driver for AMD/ATI graphic cards. The open source alternative is radeon.

Hardware detection

To choose the right driver, first detect the graphics card. You can use lspci for this task:

root # lspci | grep -i VGA

If you have an AGP card, also detect the chipset supporting AGP:

root # lspci | grep -i AGP

Hardware support

Product name	Driver version	X server (max)	Bus	Note
Radeon HD 5000 and newer	13.1	1.13	PCIe
Radeon HD 2000 - 4000	13.1_pre897	1.12.49	PCIe or AGP	Mask ati-drivers slot 1 and newer, see below
Radeon HD 1000 and older				Use radeon driver

Force legacy driver

Mask >=ati-drivers-13.1 and >=xorg-server-1.13:

root # echo "# Force legacy driver" >> /etc/portage/package.mask
root # echo ">=x11-base/xorg-server-1.13" >> /etc/portage/package.mask
root # echo "x11-drivers/ati-drivers:1" >> /etc/portage/package.mask

Installation

Kernel

You need USB support. Also you need to activate the following kernel options:

Kernel configuration

Loadable module support --->
    [*] Enable loadable module support
Processor type and features  --->
    [*] MTRR (Memory Type Range Register) support
Bus options (PCI etc.)  --->
    [*] PCI Express support
    [*] Message Signaled Interrupts (MSI and MSI-X)
Device Drivers  --->
    Graphics support  --->
        < > Direct Rendering Manager (XFree86 4.1.0 and higher DRI support) --->

If you have an AGP card, enable AGP support:

Kernel configuration

Device Drivers  --->
    Graphics support  --->
        <*> /dev/agpgart (AGP Support)  --->
            Choose your AGP driver, e.g.:
            <*> AMD Opteron/Athlon64 on-CPU GART support

Driver

Portage uses the variable VIDEO_CARDS for enabling support for various graphics cards in packages. Setting VIDEO_CARDS to fglrx will pull in the driver x11-drivers/ati-drivers:

File/etc/portage/make.conf

VIDEO_CARDS="fglrx"

Check the USE flags of x11-drivers/ati-drivers:

→ Information about USE flags

USE flag	Default	Recommended	Description
debug	No	No	Enable extra debug codepaths, like asserts and extra output. If you want to get meaningful backtraces see http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/qa/backtraces.xml
modules	Yes	Yes	Build the kernel modules
multilib	No		On 64bit systems, if you want to be able to compile 32bit and 64bit binaries
qt4	Yes		Install qt4 dependent optional tools (e.g Catalyst Control Panel)
static-libs	No	No	Build static libraries

After setting this you want to update your system so the changes take effect:

root # emerge --ask --changed-use --deep @world

acpid

Some cards need acpid running to handle events. See the ACPI article.

Configuration

Initial setup

This will generate an initial xorg.conf which uses the fglrx driver:

root # aticonfig --initial

If this command fails without error, copy the file /root/xorg.conf.new to the default location:

root # cp xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Set the OpenGL driver to use fglrx:

root # eselect opengl set ati

Permissions

If you have the USE flag acl enabled globally and are using ConsoleKit (i.e you're using a Desktop profile) permissions to video cards will be handled automatically. You can check the permissions using getfacl:

user $ getfacl /dev/dri/card0 | grep larry

---

user:larry:rw-

A broader solution is to add the user you want to be able to access the video card to the video group:

root # gpasswd -a larry video

Note that you will still be able to run X without permission to the DRI subsystem, but usually not with acceleration enabled.

Settings

The most comfortable way for most users is to use opt/bin/amdcccle as a graphical UI to configure the driver.

Troubleshooting

• Gentoo bugtracker: known bugs

Unexplained segmentation faults and kernel crashes

If you experience unexplained segmentation faults and kernel crashes with this driver and multi-threaded applications such as Wine set UseFastTLS in xorg.conf to either 0 or 1, but not 2.

See also

• fglrx Quick Switch - Quickly switch between this driver and the open Radeon driver using GRUB 2 without downgrading xorg-server.
• hprofile - Another method for switching between graphics drivers.
• uvesafb - Framebuffer support with binary drivers.

External resources

• Community Gentoo Wiki article
• X.Org Wiki