Those of you who don't live under a rock will have learned by now that AMD has published VDPAU code to use the Radeon UVD engine for accelerated video decode with the free/open source drivers.
In case you want to give it a try, mesa-9.2_pre20130404 has been added (under package.mask) to the portage tree for your convenience. Additionally you will need a patched kernel and new firmware.
grab the 10 patches from the dri-devel mailing list thread (recommended) [UPDATE]I put the patches into a tarball and attached to Gentoo bug 466042[/UPDATE]. For kernel 3.8 I have collected the necessary patches here, but be warned that kernel 3.8 is not officially supported. It works on my Radeon 6870, YMMV.
The new firmware files are
radeon/RV710_uvd.bin: Radeon 4350-4670, 4770.
radeon/RV770_uvd.bin: Not useful at this time. Maybe later for 4200, 4730, 4830-4890.
radeon/CYPRESS_uvd.bin: Evergreen cards.
radeon/SUMO_uvd.bin: Northern Islands cards and Zacate/Llano APUs.
radeon/TAHITI_uvd.bin: Southern Islands cards and Trinity APUs.
If you have any questions or problems setting up UVD on Gentoo, stop by #gentoo-desktop on freenode IRC.
In case you want to give it a try, mesa-9.2_pre20130404 has been added (under package.mask) to the portage tree for your convenience. Additionally you will need a patched kernel and new firmware.
Kernel
For kernel 3.9,Firmware
The firmware is part of radeon-ucode-20130402, but has not yet reached the linux-firmware tree. If you require other firmware from the linux-firmware package, remove the radeon files from the savedconfig file and build the package with USE="savedconfig" to allow installation together with radeon-ucode. [UPDATE]linux-firmware-20130421 now contains the UVD firmware, too.[/UPDATE]The new firmware files are
radeon/RV710_uvd.bin: Radeon 4350-4670, 4770.
radeon/RV770_uvd.bin: Not useful at this time. Maybe later for 4200, 4730, 4830-4890.
radeon/CYPRESS_uvd.bin: Evergreen cards.
radeon/SUMO_uvd.bin: Northern Islands cards and Zacate/Llano APUs.
radeon/TAHITI_uvd.bin: Southern Islands cards and Trinity APUs.
Testing it
If your kernel is properly patched and finds the correct firmware, you will see this message at boot:
[drm] UVD initialized successfully.If mesa was correctly built with VDPAU support, vdpauinfo will list the following codecs:
Decoder capabilities: name level macbs width height ------------------------------------------- MPEG1 16 1048576 16384 16384 MPEG2_SIMPLE 16 1048576 16384 16384 MPEG2_MAIN 16 1048576 16384 16384 H264_BASELINE 16 9216 2048 1152 H264_MAIN 16 9216 2048 1152 H264_HIGH 16 9216 2048 1152 VC1_SIMPLE 16 9216 2048 1152 VC1_MAIN 16 9216 2048 1152 VC1_ADVANCED 16 9216 2048 1152 MPEG4_PART2_SP 16 9216 2048 1152 MPEG4_PART2_ASP 16 9216 2048 1152If mplayer and its dependencies were correctly built with VDPAU support, running it with "-vc ffh264vdpau," parameter will output something like the following when playing back a H.264 file:
VO: [vdpau] 1280x720 => 1280x720 H.264 VDPAU accelerationTo make mplayer use acceleration by default, uncomment the [vo.vdpau] section in /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf
Gallium3D Head-up display
Another cool new feature is the Gallium3D HUD (link via Phoronix), which can be enabled with the GALLIUM_HUD environment variable. This supposedly works with all the Gallium drivers (i915g, radeon, nouveau, llvmpipe). |
| An example screenshot of Supertuxkart using GALLIUM_HUD="cpu0+cpu1+cpu2:100,cpu:100,fps;draw-calls,requested-VRAM+requested-GTT,pixels-rendered" |
If you have any questions or problems setting up UVD on Gentoo, stop by #gentoo-desktop on freenode IRC.