SUSE:AMD graphics troubleshooting

Created by: Lester Caine, Last modification: 18 Oct 2015 (23:57 BST)

FGLRX

Enable FGLRX

If you have a Radeon HD 2000 series or higher, your performance will most likely benefit from running the proprietary fglrx driver. If, after rebooting, fglrx doesn't seem to be enabled, try running the aticonfig tool manually.

aticonfig --initial

In case your display manager does not start, so while booting you only get the terminal mode logon prompt, this most likely is caused by a failure to start the X-server. So you logon as root and look at the end of /var/log/Xorg.o.log.

In case you see:

(WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@5:0:0) found
(EE) No devices detected.

there is something wrong in the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf There should be only one section ServerLayout, Monitor, Device and Screen. If there are more equal sections, pick one and delete the other(s). Especially the Device section requires attention and pick the one that corresponds with the device that you see using the command

# lspci

If the output is:

05:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV770 [Radeon HD 4850]

the corresponding line in the Device section should be:

      BusID       "PCI:5:0:0"

Disable FGLRX

If, after having installed FGLRX, you find that X is unable to start. This procedure describes the process of re-enabling the open source radeon driver.

Blacklist

One of the first things fglrx does to ensure that radeon doesn't interfere with it is it blacklists the radeon module so that the kernel doesn't load it while booting.

# rm /etc/modprobe.d/fglrx.conf

or

# rm /etc/modprobe.d/50-fglrx.conf

X11 Configuration

When fglrx is installed, aticonfig creates xorg.conf containing configuration details for running fglrx. The default configuration files are in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/, so it's ok, in this case, to completely remove xorg.conf.

# rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Load radeon

The next thing you'll want to do is to load the radeon module. Modprobe makes this easy:

# modprobe radeon

Restart X

Restarting X is relatively simple: [Ctrl]-[Alt]-[Backspace]+[Backspace]