Adventures As Me

Resolving fglrx issue initializing dri

Written 15 May 2012

Executive summary: newer versions of fglrx appear to rely upon ACPI support. Ensure you don't have ACPI disabled at boot time. On OpenSUSE 12.1 all attempts to make 3d accelartion with the ATI Proprietary drivers resulted in failure. This was particularly troublesome as I had used the same setup for years (with the same hardware). Normally my operating system updates followed a simple outline:

  1. Update the OS
  2. Install latest ATI Drivers
  3. Restore working xorg.conf
  4. Reboot

That didn't work with the 12.1 upgrade. Searching /var/log/Xorg.0.log gave me my only clue:

[    46.185] (WW) fglrx(0): ***********************************************************
[    46.185] (WW) fglrx(0): * DRI initialization failed                               *
[    46.185] (WW) fglrx(0): * kernel module (fglrx.ko) may be missing or incompatible *
[    46.185] (WW) fglrx(0): * 2D and 3D acceleration disabled                         *
[    46.185] (WW) fglrx(0): ***********************************************************

You'll find numerous articles about installing and troublehsooting this and similar issues. They didn't work. What did work:

  1. (as root) modprobe -v fglrx
  2. Note failure to insmod button
  3. Research the button kernel module
  4. Note this is an ACPI module
  5. Check /boot/grub/menu.lst
  6. Remove acpi=off from menu.lst
  7. Reboot

Now I have both 2d and 3d acceleration. If only a clearer error message had been given...

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