ATI X550 support

@Hans
I have an ASUS ATI EAX550 PCIe card that I could use for testing vfio passthrough but it's not listed as a supported card. I don't have it in the machine now so don't have detailed lspci info but it seems to have PCI ID: 1002:5b60. It is very similar to X300 which seems to be supported by Radeon driver such as this one:
https://theretroweb.com/expansioncards/s/ati-radeon-x300-se so would the X550 work or can support be added or can I change the IDs somewhere to test it? (Maybe vfio-pci can take ID override so I could try to set it to the X300SE ID but what IDs does the Radeon driver accept?

I also have an HD6450 but that has a noisy fan that would need to be repaired and I don't have driver for that and I don't intend to spend money on software so I'd rather use the X550 which is passive cooled. Last time I tried the HD6450 was recognised by the amigaone U-Boot but the install CD has no RadeonHD lite driver on it so could not test it in AmigaOS. On pegasos2 it would only work on pci.0 which I've only fixed afterwards and on sam460ex which could work there's the problem in the U-Boot that it only expects HD and RX cards on pcie and that does not work yet so I gave up on that at that point. The X550 while slower could be less problematic to get work as the driver is included with AmigaOS4 and latest QEMU should support it now so maybe it worth a try again if it could work.

@balaton

where you live in the world? i have a few cards back at home i can give away to help with the testing. not home for another week though. and dont remember right now what i have.

@balaton
Quote:Is there a complete list of gfx cards supported by ATIRadeon.chip somewhere?
AFAIK it only supports R100 and R200 series cards, but not R300 ones like your X550 (RV370).

Edit: https://www.acube-systems.biz/compatibility/compatibility_41.php includes R300 gfx cards like the 9600 and 9800, and with a green check mark (= driver included in AmigaOS 4.1, i.e. the ATIRadeon.chip gfx driver implemented by the Frieden brothers and not Hans' RadeonHD.chip or RadeonRX.chip), looks like ATIRadeon.chip supports R100, R200 and R300.
The ACube list only includes hardware which was tested with AmigaOS 4.1, so your X550 might be supported and just isn't in the list because nobody tried one yet, or did but didn't tell ACube if it works on AmigaOS 4.1 or not.

@joerg
Previously pass through wasn't supported with these Radeon cards in QEMU only RadeonHD and newer so I could not try. This was improved in QEMU 10 so maybe it can work now. I've put the card back in the machine now and will do some tests eventually when I'll have time. There may still be a problem with having Intel iGPU next to it which does not like VGA arbitration without some patches and this may be a problem because this card surely has no AtomBIOS so may need its own ROM to run. I was asking because there's a list of names in the Radeon driver and that lists X300 SE but not X550 so maybe it would need at least some PCI ID added or changed somewhere. I can probably figure that out but simpler to ask.

@noXLar
Thanks. Problem is less with getting cards than having time for testing them so instead of sending cards it may help more to test them instead if you can do that. I just wanted to get at least one card working so I can do tests locally but I don't intend to test all cards myself.

@balaton
Quote:PCI Radeon gfx cards (ATIRadeon.chip driver on AmigaOS) don't have an AtomBIOS, only the old x86 BIOS which is emulated by the x86 emulators of U-Boot, CFE, SmartFirmware or the x86emu.resource on classic Amigas.
Only the newer Radeon HD/RX gfx cards (AmigaOS gfx drivers RadeonHD.chip and RadeonRX.chip) have an AtomBIOS.

Your X550 is a very special case, nearly all gfx cards supported by the AmigaOS ATIRadeon.chip driver are PCI gfx cards, a few of them are AGP cards, but none PCIe ones. At least none that I'm aware of that has already been used successfully with AmigaOS.

@joerg
The X300 SE I think was PCIe but maybe there was an AGP version too and maybe that was tested (after all back then there were no PCIe AmigaNG machines yet, were there). But it will appear PCI with pass through anyway so maybe it could work. I like this card because it's passive cooled, can be put in modern machine without adapters and I have one so I'm interested to try to make it work some way.

@balaton

Sorry, but I'm not sure what the state of R3x0/RV3x0 chipset support is on AmigaOS. The RadeonHD river started with the R5x0 series (e.g., Radeon X1500), so any support for R3x0 will be in the atiradeon.chip driver.

Back in AmigaOS 4.0 days, most people used a Radeon 9000/9250, because those had the best 2D & 3D support. IIRC, there was at least partial 2D support for some R3x0 cards, but I have no idea what cards actually worked.

Hans

@balaton
https://intuitionbase.com/articles/graphics-cards-sam440ep-flex "2.4 Limited use of drivers"
R300 cards are only partially supported (no HW compositing, no 3D drivers), but I guess the main reason you want to try vfio pass through with your X550 is to compare the "MemCopy performance" of GfxBench2D on AmigaOS 4.1 with similar host OS benchmarks, for example x11perf with ShadowFB disabled, and for that the AmigaOS 4.1 support for it is enough.

obsolete entries deleted

@joerg
I want to test multiple things: if vfio-pci now works with older cards and to have any card so I can try pass through with that and this one is at least silent so I can leave it in the machine. I have no 3D driver even for newer cards so I don't care much about that, anything that produces a picture might be enough for testing and this older cards at least have a driver on the install CD so no need to set that up separately. But such older cards don't have AtomBIOS and I have an Intel iGPU which may conflict so it may not work at the end so not sure I'll get any results but it's something to play with eventually.

I have tried this after having to patch i915 module with VGA arbitration patch to allow x-vga=on to work with Intel iGPU. On unpatched i915 without x-vga=on it freezes the machine or breaks host display and does not work as the ATI card ROM wants to access VGA ports. With patched i915 driver it now can access the card and I can see amigaone U-Boot output on it but neither MorphOS nor AmigaOS seem to like this card. The pegasos2 firmware does not recognise it neither MorphOS. AmigaOS on amigaone does not print the missing graphics card message so maybe it finds the card but then stops without printing any logs (even with loglevel=17) and I get no picture. So not sure how to find where it stops. Is there a way to force a crash log in AmigaOS kernel somehow when it's stuck? I can only get a register dump from QEMU or could try gdb backtrace but I don't know what the addresses belong to so that's not too useful.

I tried with Linux but I could not get a picture. It sees the card but selects a mode that my monitor says is out of range. The log I get is:



The Cannot match card to OF node seems normal, amigaone has no OF and I get the same with ati-vga which does produce picture. The clock values seem to match what wikipedia says but the memory and core values are swapped? Maybe it can't handle the EDID from the monitor or I can try what if I only connect one output. I've connected both VGA and DVI and with U-Boot I get ouptut on both, with guests I only get garbled output on VGA with AmigaOS and MorphOS but they freeze and out of range output for the monitor on Linux. Assuming 8x8 font then 320x90 would be 2560x720 where the native mode would be 2560x1440 but that's likely too large for this old card and I think the monitor also only accepts that on HDMI so maybe it's just selecting the wrong mode. I thought I have a radeonfb option to set mode in kernel command line but checking again looks like I didn't so maybe that's why.
EDIT: Tried adding video=radeonfb:1280x720 to kernel command line but then got some error which may be because reset issue with older AMD cards which only work once per host reboot and there is no fix for that for these older cards only for RX ones so this does not seem to be a very usable setup so far.