Slashdot Mirror
Problems With OEM ATI Cards And ATI's Linux Driver
Doug Bostrom writes "Over at FlightGear.org, Andy Ross describes how ATI's new Linux drivers only seem to work with "official" ATI cards (made by ATI), why that does not make sense, and a possible fix that unfortunately would mean booting Windows, if only for a few minutes."
According to the message posted, the utility used to reflash the BIOS runs in DOS, not Windows, and will work in FreeDOS
There are a few possible explanations for this rather odd driver situation...
I know this is rumor-mongering, but I can't help but notice that the *Windows* drivers dont' perform such a check, and neither do the Linux Retail drivers...
Consider this: Microsoft or some other party requests unofficially that ATi *not* support Linux in its OEM hardware, just for the sake of not having OEM desktop vidcard support for Linux...this could explain things like the OEM/Retail check that occurs in Linux, but not Windows. Interesting stuff..I want to see what ATI's reaction on this is.
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
This is probably a very good argument for non-binary, truly open-source drivers...
/* affect != effect */ void affect(int *thing,int effect) { *thing += effect; }
I've been hearing about bad ATI drivers since the days of the 80386. I've had some severe problems with ATI drivers myself, and needed to call ATI tech support. My impression is that the company should not allow receptionists to write drivers when they are not answering phones.
My answer: For business use, buy Matrox.
Nvidia drivers for linux are really good but So are Matrox's. Matrox write some bitchen drivers like Nvidia but unlike Nvidia they GPL the whole thing. Getting all the windows functionality in linux for both my GF4 and G400 cards is perfectly easy. I advise buying from those two companies for linux. Matrox cards though old are very nice because they are cheap and they have good linux duel head support.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
nVidia's drivers are wonderful, there's so many to choose from! In this modern age of infinite personalization and the choice to the nth degree, I love knowing that that somewhere on the interweb, there's a 12meg unified driver set made JUST FOR ME.
They are not drivers for the ATI Card itself, they are drivers for the ATI CHIPSET.
ATI makes cards with its own Chipset but they also let other companies (such as Sapphire) makes their own boards with ATI GPU's, and they are supposed to use the same drivers.
Incase anyone is wondering, Sapphires cards are way cheaper and sometimes (in the 8500's case) they outperform ati's own cards.
RTA -F(polite)
He didn't have windows/dos/fat partitions at all. he downloaded freedos and used a ramdrive to flash his videocard's bios. thats all that was wrong. the ATI driver checks to make sure the videocard is an ATI card. It should just check for an ATI chipset. Sounds like a problem ATI will pacth in the next release.
Not so, not so, not so. ATI has a reason for ensuring that their drivers function properly only with authorized hardware. ATI's marketing strategy centers around the company being recognized for making the top-quality graphics cards on the market. This definition includes all components from circuit boards to microchips. ATI's primary market is those consumers who need or want top-of-the-line video cards for personal or professional reasons. The ATI brand's image of exclusivity and quality plays a viutal role in the company's marketing strategy.
Having taken this into account, consider the Linux user community's reputation for using "hacked" or "modded" hardware for all sorts of reasons from saving money to illegally circumventing copyright restrictions. It follows that it is totally in ATI's interest to release drivers that work with their hardware exculsively. To do otherwise would be to associate the ATI brand with all matter of hacked, downscale, and jerry-rigged hardware, a move which would ultimately prove a detriment to ATI's profits.
If you go into a computer store and ask for an OEM ATI chances are you'll get a white box made by some unknown company that just took the ATIs chips and slapped them on the board , even though technicly OEM meens its made by ATI. this isn't a bad thig as 99% of the time "OEM" stuff works just as well as retail. this is more of a case of bad ATI drivers doing poor bios checking
I have an Excalibur (ATI 9000 Pro based card), and have to run through a series of installs
to stop the video card locking up my Win2K system. The original drivers seem to be buggy.
When it is working fine (like now), it is a damned fine graphics card, its just such a
bitch to get going.
http://jesus.everdense.com/
Open. Closed.
Yes, you were mistaken. ATI's drivers are not open source. The GATOS project is open source and provides drivers for ATI's cards, but is not affiliated with ATI.
Presuming you already have Linux installed, you should look in the various /usr/doc/whatever
directories belonging to the XFree86 stuff (there
will probably be a whole load of different packages
required for X, I don't know about Redhat/Mandrake
as I use Debian) and look for a file like README.DRI,
which might be gzipped (it is for me). The file also
tells you how to make sure that X will try to use
OpenGL (not difficult, may already be done for you!)
Alternatively, the actual DRI webpages are more up to date, and more thorough about which versions of cards they support - look for the "status" page for a start!
Configuring stuff, heh, I forget! If you have X set up to use your card, and tell it to use OpenGL, it will know whether your card can do it or not, and will try to load the appropriate kernel module. In my case, using a G400 card, it doesn't manage this, as it wants to have the agpgart module installed before the mga module, but doesn't realise to do this, so when my machine's booted, I normally modprobe the agpgart module myself, and then the mga module, and then the OpenGL works fine. Really, I should set up the modules.conf files to do this automatically, but I can't be bothered.
Bear in mind, that the mga module is only right for using G400/G200 cards, and the other cards would want other kernel modules! Also, those other kernel modules might not have those same requirements. In short, your mileage may vary.
But to return to the point in hand: If you don't want to be downloading binary-only drivers, then nVidia based cards are NOT what you want; they have no opensource 3d drivers at all that I know of. Some of the ATi cards are supported out of the box (I don't know how well!!) and some are only supported by ATi's driver so far, the one in the article.
Be careful! New moon tonight.
Sure, buy a crap card (LE means it didn't pass the "non LE" test, it's underclocked).
/.
Then flash it with an ATI firmware. FYI the GPU & RAM clock speed are... in the firmware.
That means his card is "overclocked" an probably instable as well, else they wouldn't sell it a LE.
Then, test some drivers, and make a flame report about it, and then get it posted on
So, instead of encouraring the company to make competitive drivers (binary, not binary, who cares: we want drivers THIS YEAR) lets do the contrary and flame them.
If you look at this comment as coming from someone who might not have a Windows partition/licence, then it's simply an honest expression of a disappointment in a technical restriction they can't overcome either costlessly or legally.
That said.
I have been in the computer game for a long time and have been threw every component and its manufacturer under the sun.
ATI gets a bad rap because it sold a buncha crappy cards with crappy drivers a while back. But they hired the Apple PR team to pimp them and a lotta people bought these cards and got screwed. The ads were better than the actual performance.
NVIDIA came along with a couple of nice 16 meg cards that worked well with Open GL and Direct X, and were fairly cheap.
ATI retaliates and does the Original Radeon. Pretty much junk except for the 3d performance. But ATI had been a traditionally OEM supplier anyway. Not a lot of experience for the high end commercial product. Remember the day of 3d cards? You would see STB and VooDoo, and that was about it.
The Geforce is a great product, sold a helluva lot, did the job become popular. But ATI revamped and started with the 8500, cleaned its driver act up and their cards kick ass.
I have an 8500 64 meg I grabbed from NewEGg and am perfectly happy with it, all 3d games in windows and it works well in Linux. My other box has a geforce 3 and it works well two. Though for web stuff, 2d, the ATI hands it its ass.
Problem with most people is they buy the bargain basement, OEM, close out, and it doesn't work to expectations. Well, GEE, musta been a reason for the closeout sale for all that white box shit. Oh yeah, paid 74 bucks 2 months ago for the 8500, tv out and all.
AS for those drivers from ATI, there are for ATI cards. In the day there were many problems with NVIDIAs reference drivers not working with third party manufacturers.
I understand we are all cheap computer people, and we conserve where we can. Between pricewatch and EBAY. But I learned a long time ago. Spend that extra 20 dollars for the retail CPU, get the 3 year warranty. Get that name brand motherboard. Cause it never fails, you buy something cheap and it burns out and you gotta buy again.
I think ATI and NVIDIA are par with each other and I am glad. Good competition. I understand the loyalty to NVIDIA, they were the reigning champions. ATI is kicking ass too. IT is better for all of us. And as for you guys who bought that 64 meg 20 dollar Radeon 7000(cause it said 64 meg) sorry dudes, shoulda ponied up some more cash/
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
There is a difference between "Built by ATI" and "Powered by ATI". The problem you're seeing with OEM and non-ATI manufactured cards (aka "Powered by ATI") is in the BIOS -- the driver expects an official ATI BIOS (which would be a on "Built by ATI" card) and doesn't see it, so it won't work. The "Powered by" cards use reference drivers which aren't tweaked to any particular iteration of the card. "Built by" drivers won't install on non-ATI cards.
Solutions: Flash the BIOS as some have been suggesting, or buy an official card. Or just yell at ATI enough until they release a reference driver.
-----------
POiT!
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Most of the times it is not really bashing windows. You would begin to understand if you could only, let's say, read your documents in pure-dos-6.22 mode. :)
It's even worse for us linux guys. My home computer has an uptime of 23 days right now, i NEVER close my mozilla window, i NEVER close my consoles, i never stop XMMS (mp3 player). I have 4 desktops full of windows. I get up, work, go for a walk, work, go to work sometimes, back, work...
If i suddenly have to reboot to read a crappy word file that openoffice can't import correctly... my reaction is naturally "unfortunatelly" !
I'm used to to have a desktop that is just there. ALL the time. It's not much to redo everything but it's not something i want to do.
To sum up, for me it would be "unfortunate" if i had to boot a different linux distro as well.
And i did say MOST of the times. Sometimes, it's just bashing microsoft of course
Washington bullets will simply be known as the "Bulle
I don't know how much Matrox helped with getting the Linux/XFree86/GDI drivers written. I'm fairly sure it was mostly thanks to hackers who reverse engineered the Windows drivers.
My other first post is car post.
I've been in touch with tech support at the OEM for my Radeon 9000 Pro, Power Color. They are not happy with the situation and the pressure is on for ATI to get a fix out ASAP. Latest email estimated sometime next week for drivers that work on all of the OEM cards.
I also get the impression that this was not a conspiracy. The drivers use the INT10 support in the card's video BIOS. The OEM video BIOS's vary slightly from card to card depending on what features they implemented (2 DAC vs 1, etc). The driver needs to be adjusted for each of the various BIOS. That's why flashing the ATI BIOS works. ATI just made it work on their cards first and will be filling in support for OEM cards ASAP.
A mindset more graphics cards companies should adopt.
That argument makes zero sense.
1. Nobody, Linux hacker or otherwise, builds cards in their basement with modern surface mounted chips, it would cost dozens of times more than the card itself does.
2, They still have to buy the chips from ATI (if they have some other chips that ATI's drivers are useful for then ATI is in much worse trouble that from from your fantasy Linux hardware builder.)
3. The fix for the other cards was simple enough to be totally trivial for anybody capable of building the card from scratch.
You have to do better than this nonsense to try to insult Linux users. Go back to school.
What are some of the other reasons?
Instead of all the jumping-through-hoops to build a bootable DOS floppy etc., why aren't the hardware manufacturers starting to build Linux-based tools?
The GPL'd FreeDOS project deserves kudos for providing legacy support alright, but Linux also provides additional reliability (no lockups during BIOS flashing...), choices between CLI or various GUIs, continued cutting-edge development of the environment with support for USB, FireWire or whatever media peripherals might be available and even support for hardware platforms other than x86 (e.g. Mac peripherals have BIOSes as well), to mention some advantages off the top of my head.
Since hardware manufacturers can't continue relying on DOS much longer now that MS is pulling the plug, the obvious choice for boot-time tools is really the freely-distributable Linux. It would be a tragedy for everyone but Microsoft if Windows became the successor of DOS as the *required* hardware maintenance platform.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
Here's a thread where people asked the same question on running 'powered by' cards and it contains a link that we found which seems to solve the problem. (Requires hex editing a file and the 'powered by' restriction is gone)
h re adid=33648944&perpage=20&pagenumber=4
http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?s=&t
I've got a OEM 9000 PRO from ATi and it refused to work initially:
/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers/fglrx_drv.o
(--) fglrx(0): Chipset: "Radeon RV250 If" (Chipset = 0x4966)
(--) fglrx(0): (PciSubVendor = 0x148c, PciSubDevice = 0x2039)
(--) fglrx(0): board vendor info: third party grafics adapter - NOT original ATI
(--) fglrx(0): Linear framebuffer (phys) at 0xd8000000
(--) fglrx(0): MMIO registers at 0xe9000000
(--) fglrx(0): ChipRevID = 0x00
(--) fglrx(0): VideoRAM: 131072 kByte (64-bit DDR SDRAM)
(EE) fglrx(0): board/chipset is not supported by this driver (third party board)
I quickly came to the conclusion that the ATi drivers don't like non-ATi cards. I did a bit of searching and I found a solution - I did not find this myself!
Install and configure the drivers as per normal. Also, I suggest you download "hexedit" from freshmeat.net as you'll need it. You'll then need to hexedit this file:
To let it accept non-ATi boards, hexedit the file at offset 0x626e and alter "74 44" to "90 90" and save changes and away you go. Since making this change only, my 9000 PRO now works fine under RH 8.
This means no Vesa drivers! It means no more 60Hz screen refreshes! It means for GL acceleration. Run "glxinfo" for some information on the status of OpenGL and maybe "glx_gears" to actually test it. It should run very quickly.
Enjoy!