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Karmic Koala & ATI Radeon

This post will deal with the Alpha4 release of Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala", and it's new features, particularly the functionality of ATI Radeon cards.

I did a clean install yesterday, and this is what i'm liking so far:

• Empathy, the new default IM client is awesome. I didn't find plugin support yet, but it's light, and clean. Just the way i like it.
• The boot time is less than 20 seconds on my machine. It's nearly not enough to go do anything else while i'm waiting, which is a great feature for someone that has to deal with windows vista at work every day...
• Firefox 3.5 ubuntu branded by default. Thanks. That package is missing from 9.04 right now, and while you can still install it, it takes some work to go from the Beta name of "Shiretoko" to Firefox, with icons and everything. It works, but it's not perfect.

What i don't like:

• The new default login screen sucks ass.
• While the new 2.6.31 series kernel is a great improvement in many areas, AMD has not yet supported it in it's binary fglrx drivers (which offer 3d acceleration and the works on ATI cards)

So this will be the topic of discussion today. ATI cards have traditionally been much worse than those of Nvidia on any Linux distro. AMD (ex. ATI) offers drivers called fglrx which provide full 3D acceleration in Linux, and when they are working, the cards can offer great performance. However. When they don't work, disaster ensues.

When you install Karmic, you'll get the traditional "Hardware Drivers" dialog, which will say you have a device that requires propietary drivers that weren't installed by default. Yeah no shit they weren't. You select your device, you hit install. It downloads the drivers, installs them, makes modifications to xorg.conf, and asks you to reboot. With Karmic Alpha4, i got no download dialog, even if it seemed to do something. The selection of my card remained inactive and grey, instead of the green "activated" button that appears when drivers have been installed. So i thought that the drivers somehow failed (didn't look at debug or anything). I went about my business, doing an apt-get update && apt-get upgrade, and then rebooting.

To my great dismay, it wouldn't load gdm at all, but instead displayed an esoteric graphical pattern in the top section of my screen. So, switch to a shell, check out /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and sure enough, fglrx was jotted down as the driver. So clearly, this didn't work.

To get past this problem, uninstall and clean the fglrx drivers. They are not supported in the 2.6.31 kernel yet, so we need to wait for AMD's 9.9 series drivers for this. Usually they'll be out in time for the Beta's or at least the release, so i'm not fretting.

Run:

aptitude purge xorg-driver-fglrx && dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg && exit

This removes the driver, deletes anything related to it, and runs a reconfigure on xorg.

You should now have a clean xorg.conf. Install the xorg-driver-radeon if you don't have them (i'm not sure, i think they were installed by default), and then edit xorg.conf and in the device section, set the driver option to "radeon", if it isn't.

You should now be able to boot in to a graphical user interface.

Okay dual screens. To make these work, as a "big desktop", make your xorg.conf look like this. I tried different options, and fiddling around with the "System -> Preferences -> Display" dealio, but that didn't get me anywhere. It'll ask you to "automatically set the virtual resolution to match your screens", but the end result was 2048 x 2048, in xorg.conf, which obviously didn't work.

Here's my xorg.conf:

Section "Screen"
Identifier      "Default Screen"
DefaultDepth    24
SubSection "Display"
Virtual 3360 1050
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Module"
Load    "glx"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier      "Default Device"
Driver  "radeon"
EndSection

In all it's simplicity, i made the virtual resolution match the maximum resolutions of my screens set next to each other. I have two 22" Samsungs, each with a 1680x1050 resolution. So i added up the width resolution and that was it. I restarted X (why does ctrl-alt-bkspace not work anymore?), and went to Display, and then unchecked "mirror displays", and dragged the screens next to each other. Apply, Ok, restart X. Dual screen.

UPDATE! Video playback works *much* better with the radeon drivers than the fglrx drivers ever did in Jaunty 9.04! I'm playing a FullHD video, in full screen with no tearing (which was evident in 9.04 with fglrx drivers), and no problems. 40 CPU load on one core. 500 megs ram used with a bunch of other stuff on as well.

So conclusions: If you don't need 3d performance (i.e. compiz, gaming whathaveyou), don't install the propietary drivers. Stick with the open-source ones!

Ubuntu 9.04 & CPyrit-Stream now working!

Yay!

I've finally gotten the Pyrit program running and utilizing ATI Stream! I followed these instructions to the letter, though i built RPM from source with the patch for LZMA compressed RPM's, which did the trick (although, i've also read the 1.4.0 beta 2 package of the Ati Stream SDK doens't have this problem, but anyhow). I think i also had to apt-get some libraries that were missing, but they were listed pretty well in the instructions.

As for building pyrit, i used the instructions in the wiki, that can be found here. I ran in to an error while building the pyrit source, but that was fixed by doing an edit in a file according to these instructions. Fixes for other common errors are in the installation wiki.

So for the order: Install Atistream and Atical according to the instructions in the KB. Apt-get any packages you are missing. Build and install Pyrit, then CPyrit-Stream.

Run the command pyrit list_cores, which should show something like the screenshot below, and then run pyrit benchmark to see what kind of numbers you're getting on your hardware. I am amazed. Compare the over 8000 PMKs/s (pairwise master keys), with the ~700 of one Phenom II X4 940 cores. Look at those results (yes yes, synthetic benchmark..):

List cores and Benchmark on my Radeon 4850 (and Phenom 2 940)

You'll note that it only shows three of the four cores on my Phenom, this is a feature. For every GPU core that it handles, it saves one CPU core for scheduling tasks.

A man can always dream... That there is about 3000 euros worth of hardware  (four Nvidia GTX295's, a motherboard to support 4 Pci-e cards, processor, memory.. i guestimated). 80 000 PMKs / s (or half of that, depending on how you read the benchmarks). It seems to see the cards as two cores each.

Edit for 15.8.09 - I'm working on a proper howto for this thing since the internets seem not to have a coherent guide for a current ubuntu version. The 8.04 guide is great, don't get me wrong, but i think it could be more complete. I've also e-mailed AMD to ask about providing .deb packages on my / their site, and or publishing the new howto.

Ubuntu 9.04 x64 & Pyrit with ATI Stream

Okay, so since i just got the new graphics card (an ASUS EAH4850), i wanted to try out some of the GPU computing possibilities of the card. The Pyrit project exists to take advantage of multiple GPU computing platforms, such as Nvidia CUDA, and ATI Stream, so i decided to give that a whirl.

I downloaded the Pyrit and the Ati Stream packages from the Pyrit site. I found out i also need the ATI Stream SDK, which can be obtained from the AMD site. The thing to be noted here is that there is currently only support for RPM based systems, such as Fedora, CentOS etc. So of course, i thought, "Alien!", the package converter. I apt-get'ed Alien and RPM, and got working on the thing.

You download the package, which is a .tar.gzip file. Unpack the file to get to the .run file. The run file can be exectured simply with ./filename.run. This should result in the script from the .run file being executed. It'll fail shortly after the EULA, or it did on my x64 system.

I opened up the run file, and commented out the part where it deletes the temporary folder where it extracts the actual RPM file (and before that, tries to run rpm on the file, which fails).

#!/bin/bash
echo "ATI Brook+ SDK Installer"

TMP="atibrook"

HERE=`pwd`
DST=/usr/local
FOPEN="more"
RPM="alien"

#Extract archive into /tmp/atibrook
echo -n "Extracting archive..."
dd if=$0 of=/tmp/${TMP}.tar.gz bs=1 skip=16384 >& /dev/null
echo "DONE"
mkdir /tmp/atibrook
cd /tmp/atibrook
echo -n "Uncompressing package..."
tar -xzf ../${TMP}.tar.gz
echo "DONE"

#Accept EULA
${FOPEN} EndUserLicense.txt
echo -n "Do you accept this license agreement? [y/n]: "
read agree
if test A"$agree" = Ay -o A"$agree" = AY; then
echo "You accepted the license, continuing installation."
else
echo "You declined the license, aborting..."
rm -rf /tmp/atibrook
rm /tmp/${TMP}.tar.gz
exit
fi

#Install via rpm
echo ""
echo -n "Select a path for installation [default]: "
read USERPATH

if test "$USERPATH" != ""; then
echo "Using '$USERPATH' for directory prefix."
echo ""
echo "Installing package via RPM..."
$RPM --prefix=$USERPATH /tmp/atibrook/*.rpm
else
echo "Using default directory /usr/local/atibrook"
echo ""
echo "Installing package via RPM..."
$RPM /tmp/atibrook/*.rpm
fi

#### THIS PART I COMMENTED OUT SO IT LEAVES THE RPM INTACT ####

#Cleanup
#echo ""
#echo "Removing Temporary Files..."
#rm -rf /tmp/atibrook
#rm /tmp/${TMP}.tar.gz
echo "Exiting installation..."
exit

So the result is that in /tmp/atibrook you now have the rpm file.

Running Alien against it results in an error about rpm.pm on line 155. Something relating to perl, the complete error is:

Installing package via RPM...
Unpacking of '/tmp/atibrook/atistream-brook-1.4.0_beta-1.x86_64.rpm' failed at /usr/share/perl5/Alien/Package/Rpm.pm line 155.
Exiting installation...

Now, i have no fucking idea how to fix it. Looking at line 155, it relates to the cpio command not working properly, but how and why and what the fuck? I'm not a developer. I'll need to show this to someone, like B, maybe he can figure it out.

I also tried instructions i found on the AMD Developer Forum (requires registration). These detail the use of rpm2cpio, instead of alien, but that doesn't work either. The RPM seems malformed somehow. Perhaps as a result of it being made with a specific tool (the name of which escapes me), which creates files that are unreadable by rpm2cpio.

Blargh. I'm gonna run a Fedora 11 live CD soon, and see that it actually works. Get some numbers off this thing. It's supposed to do 7800 PKM's, which is a lot faster than for instance an Intel I7 920. Sweetness.