New mesa features for the adventurous: Radeon UVD and Gallium3D HUD

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.

Kernel

For kernel 3.9, 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.

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  1152

If 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 acceleration

To 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.

xorg-server-1.12 going stable

It is time for xorg-server-1.12 to go stable in bug 419473. If you want to help testing, run the awk command

# awk '/YOURARCHHERE/ {print "="$1}' x11_stable.list > x11_stable.keywords

on the stabilization list attached to the bug, and add the result to /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords (or package.keywords if you are still using the legacy location).

After the xorg-server upgrade, do not forget to rebuild all x11-drivers. If you find a regression, please report a bug (if none already exists) and make it block bug 419473.

In related news, our current x11-drivers/ati-drivers maintainer Enrico Tagliavini is going to step down, as support for his notebook was dropped by AMD in version 12.6. Enrico has done an excellent job maintaining the package and we thank him very much for his work.
If you care about this package and like writing ebuilds, please come to #gentoo-desktop on irc.freenode.net and contact the x11 team.

xorg-server-1.11 going stable

In bug 394393, a number of x11 packages are going stable, including x11-base/xorg-server-1.11.2-r2.
After you upgrade, don't forget to rebuild your x11-drivers packages. Use the command that is shown in the elog messages to find out which. In case you missed it:

# qlist -I -C x11-drivers/

The output of qlist can be directly passed to emerge like this:

# emerge -1 $(qlist -I -C x11-drivers/)

If you are sitting at a gdm/kdm/xdm/... login prompt and can't type anything, press Alt+SysRq+R to switch to raw input mode and Ctrl+Alt+F1 will bring you back to the console.