[elrepo] Issues with 6.4 update - AMD/ATI fglrx display drivers

[Phil Perry]

On 27/02/13 19:29, Phil Perry wrote:
>
>
> If you come across further issues related to 6.4 please feel free to
> report them in this thread or at http://http://elrepo.org/bugs
>

There is an issue with the AMD/ATI fglrx drivers and 6.4.

Red Hat updated xorg in 6.4 to version 1.13 and it has a new ABI (v13).

For display drivers to work with xorg they must support the new ABI. The 
current fglrx packages in the main elrepo repository (version 12.x) do 
not support the new xorg ABI and will not work with 6.4.

We have built the latest flgrx drivers (version 13.1) which do support 
xorg 1.13 and they are available in the elrepo testing repository for el6:

http://elrepo.org/linux/testing/el6/

However, this new fglrx 13.1 driver *only* supports AMD Radeon HD 7000, 
HD 6000, HD 5000 Series display controllers.

The legacy driver that now supports older Radeon HD 4000, HD 3000, HD 
2000 Series display controllers does NOT support Xorg 1.13 in the 6.4 
release.

This means that at present there is no AMD fglrx driver for older 
hardware (pre HD 5000 series) that will work with 6.4. If users want to 
update to 6.4 then they will have to uninstall the fglrx packages and 
revert to using the distro display drivers.

If AMD backport support for xorg 1.13 to their legacy drivers then we 
will build these for elrepo. The current legacy page is here:

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/legacy/Pages/legacy-radeon_linux.aspx

and we are looking for Xserver 1.13 support (currently listed as 1.12 on 
that page). If support for 1.13 gets added, please feel free to let us know.

Thanks.

PS - there is no issue with the current NVIDIA drivers - the latest 
current (310.32) and legacy (304.64) drivers both support the 6.4 
release (I've not tested older releases).