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ATI To Support XFree86 4.3 Soon
uninet writes "With ATI's recent offering of its first proprietary GNU/Linux drivers, we were interested to see if a follow-up driver was in store to provide compatibility with XFree86 4.3, which was released earlier this year. To find out what ATI was planning, we contact the Ontario-based company and had a conversation with their Manager of Developer Relations, Michael Smith."
nVidia has already released drivers for FreeBSD, while ATI is just starting out. They claim weird reasons like non-manageability of code... but hasnt nVidia solved that outside of X? And they claim some specs secrets will be spilled out if they opensource the thing... I wonder if those secrets would be that obvious. They should really try to make more money off their hardware rather than selling information on howto operate their hardware.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
we were interested to see if a follow-up driver was in store to provide compatibility with XFree86 4.3
But unfortunately, the XFree86 developers won't support hte new drivers for another year...
Christ, I just upgraded to 4.3. The new 'nv' driver for my Nvidia MX 2 Card causes my monitor to go into suspend mode! The monitor never comes back on, even if I "ctrl-alt-backspace' or switch workspaces with 'ctrl-alt-1', or 'ctrl-alt-2', etc.
I can still use the keyboard, so I can reboot my computer with 'init 6'; but I am typing without a monitor... typing blind.
The 'nvidia' driver from NVidia seems to work fine so far. Thank god for a company that produces quality drivers.
Of all the services I use on Linux, most were buggy a few years ago but seem to work pretty well now. XFree86 is the only product that has ALWAYS had problems...
Hopefully ATI comes out with a Freebsd driver soon. Of course if it doesn't support all their radeon series cards it'll be useless to me. Who knows maybe the linux zealots will be shouting ATI instead of Nvidia now.
Hmm. Google isn't helping today. My vague recollection was allegations of insider trading...
I was just at ATI's driver site Sunday (well, and Saturday, and Friday, and Thursday...) looking for a driver supporting X 4.3.
Vendetta looks a lot better with the ATI binary driver and maybe Racer will crash less with it.
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I have a Radeon, and XFree 4.3 shipped with Mandrake 9.1 just locks up the local machine when you try and log out.
Are you using the VESA driver? I had lots of problems with the vesa drivers with my radeon, it seems like there's a 50% chance of X hanging the whole computer whenever it starts, stops, or changes resolution in any way if I use the vesa driver...
I've had no troubles at all using the actual radeon driver, though.
Strange, I have an older Radeon (7500) that will lock with anything but the VESA drivers. And even with the VESA driver, if I want to change video settings there's a better than 50% chance it'll lock up, forceing a reboot.
I'm really glad to hear that ATI will be supporting XFree86 4.3.
Actually, I'm glad to hear that anyone will be supporting XFree86 4.3.
- Given the recent Keith Packard comments and flap over the future governance of XFree86 and
- given that X is the bedrock underlying graphical interface to all kinds of UNIX flavors,
- given that X development is rapidly moving into more insignificant minor rev levels preceded with ever more dots (X11 6.5.1 - No! Wait! X11 6.6 has been out 2 years and I didn't even notice! We'll be at X12 any day now!),
it's encouraging that someone with commercial interests finds it important to support XFree86 on their hardware."Provided by the management for your protection."
Strange, I have an older Radeon (7500) that will lock with anything but the VESA drivers.
Well, mine's the 9000, and I was really talking about the stock X 4.2.99.3 as distributed by the Xfree team themselves (compiled from source on an LFS system).
Nowadays, Knoppix boots X 4.3 and uses the vesa driver by default, and there doesn't seem to be any trouble with it. Currently I'm using the radeon driver on my RH9 system, and it seems totally fine (no reason for me to even try the vesa driver, so I can't comment on it).
Let's hope they don't support only Linux (probably via some binary module, as nVidia does), but really open up their drivers. Preferably in a way that can be used on non-PC, non-Linux too.
:)
- Hubert (not speaking for The NetBSD Project
I believe this is how XFree86 4 is meant to work: binary drivers stay compatible, even across different OS's (as long as it's the same platofrm). Yet in the interview there's a question "What about Debian"? Why wouldn't it work -- are there some specific problems with 3D acceleration etc? If the issue is RPM packaging -- well, I don't use Debian, but surely it can handle that -- heck even FreeBSD can.
You can already use it on non-Linux. The design of XFree86 means that drivers can be interchanged among any OS for the same CPU. Thus a Linux/x86 XFree86 driver will work fine on *BSD/x86, and even in theory with XFree86 on OS/2 as well. Of course, it's no substitute for a proper open source driver that can then be ported to other non-PC architectures.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
The new 'nv' driver for my Nvidia MX 2 Card causes...
Dude, you have an MX? No wonder you posted as AC, I'd be embarrassed too.