[Pkg-fglrx-devel] Bug#790789: steam: Many Games don't work using Debian's fglrx infrastructure

[Andreas Beckmann]

Hi Claudio,

it will be difficult to investigate this remotely without the hardware
and software in question ... are you willing to help us debug and fix
this issue? It may mean switching several times between packaged fglrx
driver (from unstable) und the AMD installer ... And after you switched
back to the packaged driver, always verify that it does not work for a
particular game!

On Wed, 01 Jul 2015 20:29:22 +0200 Claudio Clemens <asturio at gmx.net> wrote:
> I have an AMD Radeon R9 270 graphics card, and was getting many problems
> with some games. The games wouldn't start.
> 
> I tried many thing. Using the radeon OpenSource driver wasn't an option,
> as it lacks 3D support (at least for my card).
> 
> I tried then the debian version of the AMD driver. Almost all the

> Steam was starting fine, some games too, but some games not. They were
> not starting at all, or giving some error messages about missing
> GL-features.
These may be useful test candidates :-)

> With this setup, steam brought always at the start the warning about "no
> direct rendering" support.
Maybe even that is sufficient ...

> Then I tried the drivers downloaded directly from AMD. Installed them,
> and now steam starts without warnings, and all games are launching
> correctly. So _steam is working_.

Good. The packaged driver should work as well, but doesn't. Not good.

The interesting question is: what is different between these two
installations?

Does the Debian packaging work out-of-the-box on a native i386 installation?

Does it work with Nvidia cards and the packaged nvidia-driver (+
respective i386 packages) out-of-the-box on an amd64 system?


Some things to try for now in each of the two setups (once "working",
once "not-working"):

* glxinfo output may be interesting, but you need the 32-bit version
from mesa-utils:i386 (maybe even the 64-bit output in addition for
comparision)

* run glxinfo under strace:
    strace -e trace=access,open,close,socket,bind,connect \
           -o strace.glxinfo.out glxinfo
  and send the strace.glxinfo.out output file, that should have
  information about all libraries (tried to) open etc.

* just start steam and then run
    lsof -p  <PID_OF_STEAM_PROCESS>
  that should give a list of all libraries currently used by steam

Send all this to the bug report.


> Maybe this is a bug for the *fglrx* packages then.

Most likely ...

Once you are back to the packaged driver, please run
    reportbug -N 790789
to have reportbug collect debugging information about your installation,
that will be sent to the bug report.


Andreas