Radeon Troubleshooting

This page contains known problems and their solutions, as well as techniques for troubleshooting issues related to 3D acceleration using the open source drivers. See also the portal page.

This page is clearly not very useful in its current form. If you are a user and you have just solved a problem that you ran into, please help us make this page better by adding or improving the information contained in here!

Troubleshooting Techniques

This section should contain information about typical techniques that are useful in troubleshooting.

  • Check the output of glxinfo for hints as to what goes wrong.
  • To reboot in a safer manner when your system locks up completely, try Magic Sys Rq in linux. (Ctrl + alt + Sys Rq S U B ). Random pieces of information that could be integrated:

  • DriConf

  • LIBGL_DRIVERS_DIR, LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE, LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT, LIBGL_DEBUG

Symptoms

glxgears is very slow

Note that glxgears is not a benchmark. It doesn't matter if it renders at 3000, 5000 or 15000 fps - the only thing it can do, is show whether 3d acceleration is working: if glxgears renders at fewer than 500-1000 frames per second, there is a good chance that your DRI driver is not installed or is not working correctly.

If you ever come across this situation, you'll probably wish to find out the cause - and solve it. Here's how:

First of all, you need to confirm that you are indeed falling back to software rendering. Check the output of glxinfo according to the information on the glxinfo page.

The next step is to find out why you are falling back to software rendering. Check /var/log/Xorg.0.log for errors ('cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep EE' will return all errors from that file).

Todo: add more information on potential errors and their causes. Todo: what happens if glxgears is very slow, but we are not falling back to software rendering?