# Radeon Troubleshooting

This page contains known problems and their solutions, as well as techniques for troubleshooting issues related to 3D acceleration using the _open source_ drivers. See also the [[portal page|Radeon]]. 

This page is clearly not very useful in its current form. If you are a user and you have just solved a problem that you ran into, please help us make this page better by adding or improving the information contained in here! 

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## Troubleshooting Techniques

This section should contain information about typical techniques that are useful in troubleshooting. 

* Check the output of [[glxinfo|glxinfo]] for hints as to what goes wrong. 
* To reboot in a safer manner when your system locks up completely, try **Magic Sys Rq** in linux. (Ctrl + alt + Sys Rq   S  U  B ). 
Random pieces of information that could be integrated: 

* [[DriConf|DriConf]] 
* LIBGL_DRIVERS_DIR, LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE, LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT, LIBGL_DEBUG 

## Symptoms


### glxgears is very slow

**Note that `glxgears` is not a benchmark**. It doesn't matter if it renders at 3000, 5000 or 15000 fps - the only thing it can do, is show whether 3d acceleration is working: if `glxgears` renders at fewer than 500-1000 frames per second, there is a good chance that your DRI driver is not installed or is not working correctly. 

If you ever come across this situation, you'll probably wish to find out the cause - and solve it. Here's how: 

First of all, you need to confirm that you are indeed falling back to software rendering. Check the output of [[glxinfo|glxinfo]] according to the information on the [[glxinfo|glxinfo]] page. 

The next step is to find out _why_ you are falling back to software rendering. Check `/var/log/Xorg.0.log` for errors (`'cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep EE'` will return all errors from that file). 

Todo: add more information on potential errors and their causes. Todo: what happens if `glxgears` is very slow, but we are not falling back to software rendering?