Tag Archive: amd


Computers, CPU’s, Motherboards, upgrade aborted.

Filed Under: English by andre — Leave a comment
15 November 2013

I was planning to swap the CPU’s of two computers, but I had to abort the plans. I assumed both machines were AMD Athlon 64 machines. But upon closer inspection,
it turned out one of the machines was an AMD Athlon, the earlier 32-bit CPU. Therefore, they have incompatible motherboards, and therefore, the plan is aborted.

The reason behind all of this. My AMD Athlon 64 machine is limited to 1 GB of RAM. The motherboard works fine with 1 memory module installed, but as soon as I insert a second memory module, it won’t even initialise the graphics card. A motherboard I once traded for a bottle of whisky. Anyways, I’ve gotten another working AMD system. I have only used it once or twice, and I thought it contained an AMD Athlon 64 CPU as well, but on closer inspection, it tured out to be an AMD Athlon.

Well… seems that plan got busted. Anyhow… the said machine will get its hard disks wiped and a clean install will be performed. I might just use the same trick as I’ve used on my laptop. Just unpack the root file system from a working installation. I might also install DUET, a loadable UEFI for BIOS based systems.

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Glamor Acceleration Problems

Filed Under: English by andre — 5 Comments
1 November 2013

Since I’ve been running ArchLinux I have been experiencing certain problems. When I try to log out from XFCE4, the system appears to hang. Then, I should switch to another tty, and switch back. Then the logout window is displayed, however, the background is scrambled.

I am also experiencing trouble taking screenshots. Also now, when I run xfce4-screenshooter, it hangs until I switch to another tty and back. This makes me think the problem is related to grabbing the content of the screen.

It seems, with the particular graphics chip that is in my new laptop, a new acceleration method called “glamor”

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI#Glamor:

Since xf86-video-ati driver-1:7.2.0-1, glamor is automaticaly enabled with radeonsi drivers (Southern Island and superior GFX cards)

My graphics chip turns out to be such a “Southern Island” chip. From my /var/log/Xorg.0.log

[  3682.989] (--) RADEON(0): Chipset: "VERDE" (ChipID = 0x682d)

It says “VERDE”, which is, according to theRadeon Feature Matrixa Southern Island chip. The “marketing name” however, seems to be different, as the chip inside my laptop is called “FirePro M4000”. Whatever it’s called, it’s causing me trouble.

The Wiki page is even mentioning how to enable this “glamor” thing on older cards, but I wish to disable it. Looking at the man page of “radeon”, it reveals an option, “AccelMethod”, which can be either “EXA” or “glamor”.

Creating a /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-radeon.conf file with

Section "Device"
    Identifier "Radeon"
    Driver "radeon"
    Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
EndSection

solves the problem. I can now log out without having to switch to a different tty, and take screenshots. Also, the problem of the missing/blank icons in my system tray has been resolved by this.

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