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ATI Releases Drivers for XFree 4.3.0
Kyouryuu writes "ATI has finally released official drivers for XFree 4.3.0 and updated their Linux drivers to 3.7.0 for supported XFree versions, several months after the originally proposed release date of April last year. Although Schneider Digital has previously made available unofficial drivers, Linux users who have ATI Radeon cards can now benefit from an official release. Unfortunately, ATI still insists on using RPM exclusively and keeping the drivers closed source."
So what if the drivers are closed source? ATI cant and wont expose the low level details of their hardware's functionality to competitors. Whats the difference anyway? It is naive to think that you could even understand, let alone improve, what the engineers - who know the hardware intimately - have written? And by the way, Nvidia does not publish its source either...
Remember the Win2000 source leak. Someone noticed a fairly simple programming error (signed instead of unsigned variable IIRC). That person didn't have an initimate knowledge of Windows 2000, but they still found a bug. This is the type of situation where more eyes make for better code.
Decode these
I can run a disassembler on the code and claim they released the source in 100% pure assembly as well, but that doesn't really make it so.
RPM -> Good!
Closed source -> Bad!
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If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
Did you see ATI or nVidia providing drivers for Linux years ago? Linux's acceptance has earned it the recognition it needs from big time hardware manufacturers. Sure the drivers might not be open source, but at least they exist. And companies like IBM embracing Linux could act as a catalyst for future hardware support.
This is not a troll. I'm new to Linux, and one of the things that surprised me about it was the fact that the graphics drivers are dependent on the window system. Isn't this bass ackward? I would think that the drivers would be dependent on the hardware only, and that the window system would be a layer above the drivers.
cause NVIDIA was the first to release drivers for XFree and I have gotten used to NVIDIA line of products as a result.
FireGL drivers are optimized for cad or 3d modeling applications which primarily push polygons.
Add textures and FireGL sucks. I beleive there's win32 firegl drivers too.
ATI needs to make Catalyst drivers for linux. Until then, the high end ATI cards will never perform well.
I am trying to grasp why manufacturers don't open source their drivers, or in the case of NVidia, the hardware specs to their GPUs. The hear the same feedback from the SD community all the time, and it appears that there are two main arguments.
1: They can't OSS the driver cause there is propritary info (patented S3TC and such)
2: They can OSS and release their specs to projects like DRI as it would reveal stuff to the competition.
I say nonsense. These two arguments seem to equate OSS to GPL.
1: NV and ATI could make up their own OSS license. Lets call it the "We Need To Hide Stuff" license. They take their existing codebase and print it out. They then take a black magic marker to the printout and cross off all of the IP related stuff. They then scan the documents into Acrobat distiller and release it as a PDF. Add a statement that the code is their property under the WNTHS license and cannot be used by others, and all changes should be sent to NVidia. Problem solved. It's OSS.
2: I have never seen a processor designer "hide" their chip specs. Intel doesn't. AMD doesn't. What makes NV different? Unless they have unlicensed hardware in their product, there is no reason for them to hide what they have.
Are there any other reasons that I am missing?
Thank you for your time,
BBH
Well let's all cry ATI a river, poor poor multimillion dollar corporation. Meanwhile I'm stuck with a crappy driver for my Radeon Mobility M7 because their driver doesn't support it.
Seriously though, have you ever read an article where people dissect the design of the boards? They go into way more detail than the source code to a driver would have to. These are just journalists analyzing information ATI themselves have released. I understand that you think releasing the source code would release all kinds of information that previously wasn't released, because it will. However I think you overestimate how much anybody will care. PR using open source comments is just ludicrous, try imagining a press release where they explain, "Well ATI released their open source drivers, then on this one line this guy says "we can only do 24-bit zbuffering in pipeline 37 if the 5th register is also full". That's bad! Very bad! Don't buy their products! Don't understand it? Trust me, as their competitor I am in a completely unbaised position to tell you that it's very bad. It's may well be really really bad. Give us money."
Nobody will care. All of the real interesting technology isn't in the drivers, but the cards themselves. Drivers are just value-add and they spend alot of time just taking care of the quirks of the various applications they're trying to run. These quirks would be handled pretty easily with open source, and not be applicable to other people's drivers.
I just think "Open source drivers are bad because they'd be giving away their secrets!!" is just a knee jerk reaction, similar to when people said the same thing about closed-source operating systems. If you really stop and think about what source code they'd be giving away, there really isn't much there that is so revolutionary that it must be kept under lock and key at all times. The real beef is in the silicon.
I see a lot of people here are assuming that just because something is proprietary and/or comes from the same company that does the hardware it is assumed to be of higher quality than if it was done by someone else or in an open fasion.
:-).
As a person whom is working for one of the biggest hw/sw companies in the world and has been contributing code to some of our products, I'd say that we do things a bit different at times.
For one thing, QA and legal processes are much different than in the OSS world. The QA is extensive and a scheduled activity in a project instead of letting the users (alpha or beta teams ) find most bugs. This is just one way to do QA which might be considered a legacy of *old school* corporate development and will probably continue for quite a while longer due to many reasons.
As for the quality of code... We more or less come from the same background as most *hackers*, meaning we attended the same classes in school, read the same books on patterns, languages, design etc. as most other people in the field. We also are just human incapable of perfection and do not envision ourselves as incapable of error, error which could be spotted by peer review.
Unfortunately, peer review is still just in it's infancy at many places in the corporate landscape and there are a lot of prejudice to cope with before that process can be adopted (reasons which I believe a lot of you can imagine.. See Dilbert
It's true however that we have a slight advantage like sometimes being able to talk directly to the person who did stuff X which we happen to depend on and/or are tasked with wrapping in a software layer. However, most often we just design according to specs without contact with other HW/SW teams unless QA or unit testing reveals that the implementation is not in line with the specs, in which case we need to join forces with the people who did component X.
I for one would welcome a more open approach and it seems one of our directors of technology also understands the gain in peer review and having the code available to a larger audience. The result thus far has been that a few products have been moved to an internal sourceforge-like system/repository, to which all employees can apply for access. As we have a lot of code-litterate people, opening up the code of these products will no-doubt spur a lot of innovation, extensions and a quicker "time to market" of functionality our customers or even our own people crave for.
Please, do not assume that just because something is close sourced it's of higher quality. It's just code written by people, people who are probably a lot like yourself...
Same from Matrox, whos Linux support seems to be an utter joke.
/ mg adrivers-3.0-src.tgz
OK, so not only do they provide drivers, but they provide *source* code under a license that allows much of it to be incorporated directly into XFree86 and you call that an utter joke?
Damn, man, what will you accept?
ftp://ftp.matrox.com/pub/mga/archive/linux/2003
I run OpenBSD on non-i386 hardware. It's support like this that makes Matrox the only real option for me. I mean, try to get the nVidia Linux kernel module and binary XFree86 module running on OpenBSD/alpha.
"I have ATI hardware but I'm considering switching to nvidia. They very frequently release drivers, their drivers actually work correctly, and their drivers are available for Opteron and even Itanium."
Would you feel the same way if Nvidia started incorporating DRM into their drivers, along with the bug fixes, and additional features? What would you do about it? Nvidia's drivers already shut down (or macrovision) the TV-Out when playing certain DVD's under Windows.