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."

Comments

closed source != bad always

[grennis]

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...

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's really naive to think that someone else might be able to spot the deadlocks I seem to get from my ATI drivers. Especially since it's a software problem, not a hardware one.

Clearly software engineers would not be able to help this at all and you're definately not trolling. I mean, duh!

Re:closed source != bad always

[BoomerSooner]

Oh bullshit. You're telling me that nVidia cannot reverse engineer the binary?

It's about control, nothing more, nothing less.

Re:closed source != bad always

[lubricated]

> So what if the drivers are closed source?

No porting to ppc. No fixing minor bugs if they come up. No customizing the drivers to a particular application. No tinkering. No learning.

> ATI cant and wont expose the low level details of their hardware's functionality to competitors.

They can but they won't. Their competitors have competent engineers that can reverse engineer the stuff if needed. It's all in software anyway.

> Whats the difference anyway?

see above.

> It is naive to think that you could even understand, let alone improve, what the engineers - who know the hardware intimately - have written?

I think you are naive. There are plenty of smart people that do alot of linux work. Surely they know linux better than ATI, and thus they may be able to improve the drivers since it's not just the hardware that these drivers are specific too. Also they may be able to port the drivers to PPC or BSD.

> And by the way, Nvidia does not publish its source either...

What's your point? It would be better if they did.

Re:closed source != bad always

[fedork]

I doubt competitors can benefit by using info from driver sources. And you also seem to be contradicting yourself - on one hand can improve it but the engineers, on the other hand competitors can abuse it somehow... This really does not add up. I beleive the real reason is plain old beaurocracy.

Re:closed source != bad always

[wehe]

So why are other companies able to provide their drivers as Open Source? Do you think the developers of for example XFree86 were not capable to do a good job?

Anyway I like Open Source drivers. BTW: Don't forget to sign the Intel Support of Centrino Under Linux Petition. See more details about Linux on Centrino laptops.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

The difference is that this is Slashdot where the cranks di tutti cranks hang out. ATI could give away free video cards, open source all their drivers, and hire a bunch of strippers to come to your house and make you birthday cake... and the Slashdot crowd would still piss and moan.

Re:closed source != bad always

[wfberg]

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...

It's naive to think ATI's competitors don't have a much better understanding of their hardware than whatever can be gleaned from their drivers' sources, especially if you consider that they can already reverse-engineer the binaries better than any random Joe, seeing as they have actual money to sink into it. And there's the thing about them making the same sort of hardware.

Having the source would greatly benefit the little people though. These cards will sometime go End-Of-Live, and the manufacturer won't support them.

Perhaps the source won't be released to hide the fact these "engineers - who know the hardware intimately" make code that is in fact cruddy at times, and that it contains bugs than random Open Source jockeys can fix.

Though it's likelier that the drivers simply contain patented/copyrighted stuff they sublicensed from third-parties that are paranoid about anyone seeing it.

Re:closed source != bad always

[zzabur]

Whats the difference anyway?

Even if we don't count idiological issues, closed source drivers mean numerous annoyances to the users.

For example:

• Drivers can be buggy, and there is no way to fix it. (NVidia drivers are hang my system all the time.)
• Closed source drivers need additional EULAs and thus often cannot easily be distiributed with Linux distributions.
• Drivers need to be installed separately, which is annying, sometimes difficult and may break your system. (this is also true for Windows)
• When some new soft/hardware appears (like AMD64, 2.6 kernel), one has usually wait for months for drivers to be updated.
• Source-based distributions like Gentoo cannot compile new, performance optimized version, if driver is distributed as a binary.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Paleomacus]

Because when nVidia wants to know something about ATI drivers it's only slightly less trivial to get the information when the driver source is closed than open.

Re:closed source != bad always

[bl8n8r]

> It is naive to think that you could even
> understand, let alone improve,

I get to stare at "professional" code every day. It is nothing like what was in the textbooks. There is acres of room for improvement. silly little things like something called a buffer overflow are present in many of the implementations. I cannont believe my eyes somedays, and it's a wonder that the product that this certain company puts out, functions at all. It is under the cover of closed-source that these things are allowed to persist, and will probably never change. The company just keeps issuing patches and revisions and fixes what is terminally broken. Futhermore, the only reason these "bugs" exist is simply do to human laziness; something that could be overcome by another simple human, with the right principles, without an "intimate knowlege" of the hardware.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Jeffrey Baker]

The 3.7.0 drivers (which, btw, have been out for over a month before this Slashdot headline) are absolutely terrible. I was getting 10-15fps in UT2004 at any resolution on a Radeon 9700. I reverted to the previous release.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Nurf]

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...

I design hardware for a living, and you are wrong. There is no real benefit to hiding your hardware internals from the rest of the world. It's a knee-jerk PHB thing. It has no bearing on reality.

If you are scared of your competitors, then hiding your hardware internals costs them maybe a week, because:

1) They know how to do everything you do, anyway.
2) What they don't know they can figure out in under a week, if they put an engineer or two on it. The delta between what they do and what you do is minimal, and anything they want to know is trivial to reverse engineer.

There might be "IP" issues, which usually means there is stuff in there protected by a stupidly restrictive license with another company. In my experience, the IP usually isn't worth the bother, or if it is, the license is only restrictive because lawyers simply assume it has to be. They come from a zero sum world, and never think of any other possibilities unless you start witholding cookies.

Usually, being closed will cost your partners much more than a week - they don't just want to learn what you did, they need to interface to it, and that is _hard_. It requires much better information than simply figuring out a trick your competitor used.

I will say it again: It is very rare and unlikely that closing your software helps in a situation like this.

Re:closed source != bad always

[timeOday]

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?

In my case it makes the drivers unusable.

I wanted to plug my laptop into a 1600x1200 LCD using DVI. If you select "linux laptop driver download" at the ATI site, it says "go ask the manufacturer." Oh, goody, corporate marketing BS fingerpointing.

But IBM doesn't support 1600x1200 over DVI on my laptop. Why? Who knows. Supposedly under Windows you can get it by hacking the registry. But IBM doesn't feel like supporting it. More corporate BS.

So you go back to the ATI site and download the Mobile FireGL driver, if you're persistent enough to think of trying it on the M9 Radeon chip. Turns out it does work, but they won't tell you that due to even more corporate marketing BS.

You find that it almost works, but makes a sparkling or shimmering effect from random bit errors at 1600x1200. From the open source radeon driver mailing list, it appears that the fix is very simple. But ATI got it wrong and of course a closed source driver can't be fixed. Of course you could try to contact the ATI engineers, tell them the solution, and maybe they'll send you a fix. In your dreams.

Meanwhile the open source radeon driver runs 1600x1200 over DVI just fine. Some versions did create the shimmering effect, so somebody posted to a mailing list and helped the developer figure out what was wrong and it got fixed.

So yeah, closed source is different.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree.

First of all, the ideas and low level details of the hardware's functionality should be available to those who pay money for the card. If those ideas are advances in human knowledge, they can be patented and then the competitors can't copy them. If they aren't, then why should we give up access to them ? We aren't getting new research in return. Keeping these things secrete is giving up something (access and control) with out getting anything (investment in new research and technology) in return. I find it saddening that someone can post a knee-jerk defence of secrecy, invoking only "competitors" as a reason, and get modded up. Slashdot should have moved beyond this by now.

I stopped buying NVidia chips precisely because of their closed source drivers. You see, the reason why NVidia and now ATI go closed source is that much of their work is actually software, not hardware, work. The implementation of the functionality which is NOT on the card, but in the driver, matters a lot. NVidia was well known far having good cards simply because the software implementation of certain OpenGL fucntions was excellent. If they released the source, those would be copied by all other graphics drivers -- and then NVidia would have to compete on the quality of their hardware, which is exactly what they don't want to have to do and what is in our best interest for them to do.

By allowing more and more functionality in secrete non-Free drivers, you are essentially allowing your system to gradually become a proprietary OS with a bunch of cheap hardware dongles hanging on it. This is what Apple does.

You say "It is naive to think that you could even understand, let alone improve, what the engineers - who know the hardware intimately - have written?" Apart from the fact that your question mark is on a sentence that is not a queston, this shows a naive and uninformed view of technical history. It shows you are the kind of person who looks at computing as a matter of reading Tom's Hardware and applying your "informed" reasoning to picking components off a shelf and plugging them together.

Perhaps you would be happier with a Mac. Then you could have a unix-like operating system, with about as much freedom as you care about, and an ATI card to boot.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

PPC? Using "free software" on a MORE EXPENSIVE hardware platform is highly illogical.

Well, let's use the term "open source" here so that you can't play ignorant about the two totally different meanings of "free" anymore.

Apple hardware is generally pretty high-quality (and especially the laptops' quality/price ratio is quite good). There are people who both appreciate Apple hardware and don't want to use any proprietary software.

And as someone pointed out earlier, PPC is not the only platform left out.

Re:closed source != bad always

[lubricated]

blender comes to mind. Furthermore there is the chicken and the egg problem. No 3d drivers untill the applications come. No applications untill 3d comes.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Usquebaugh]

It's very doubtful that either Nvida or ATI do not know what is in each others past, current and future cards. The driver would not expose anything that is not already known.

The improvement is not what most people want, they want the ability to easily support their graphics card. When Nvidia/ATI moves on to the next release of hardware do you think they are going to want to support the current stuff?

Re:closed source != bad always

[be-fan]

If their binary is anything like NVIDIA's driver, that'd be a dozen megabytes of code to reverse engineer! Remember, a graphics driver is *not* a simple register-banger. Its an entire implementation of OpenGL. Much of that code is more or less hardware-independent, and has to do with optimizing display lists and whatnot. Reverse engineering the driver would be extremely difficult.

Re:closed source != bad always

[blixel]

I have an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB. I have been playing with UT2K4 for the last couple of weeks since it was released for Linux. I thought it was running pretty well on my system ... until I booted over to Windows and gave it a try. What a disappointment. Under Windows my frame rate is - *at the very least* - more than twice as high (which gives me significantly smoother play - I never thought it was jerky or anything under Linux, but it's **WAY** smoother under Windows). And visually, just about everything looks at least a little bit better, and in some cases, a LOT better. Lighting effects, wall textures, fog/smoke, and especially the flags on the walls in CTF. They look silky smooth in Windows and wave in the wind ... under Linux they are much morer flat looking and almost pixelated. I guess it's the difference between OpenGL and DirectX? And the sound quality under Windows is also signifcantly better. Reverb, echo, stadium sound, whatever it is... it sounds great in Windows.

I'm pretty bummed out about it actually because I don't feel like there's anything I can do to make it better under Linux. (Updating to the 2.6 kernel didn't help. I'm running the latest drivers for my video card and I've downloaded the nForce2 Linux drivers from nvidia for my motherboard's integrated sound. (ASUS A7N8X Deluxe, rev. 2.0)

I still prefer Linux ... games just are a significant factor for me... but it was still a real let down.

Re:closed source != bad always

[John Hurliman]

There IS a solution... buy an Nvidia card. I remember when ATI cards were considered junk, the only decent thing they had was the All-In-Wonder and the drivers were terrible. Then ATI decides to get competitive and release a GPU that performs marginally better than Nvidia's latest offering in benchmarks, now all the gaming fanboys are raving over ATI. Problem is they STILL don't know how to write proper drivers. Nvidia drivers have always been on top of the game, supporting extensions like XvMC before 90% of the open source drivers were even thinking about it. I'm not getting paid to plug Nvidia, in fact I'd say buy a Matrox G400 (top notch dual-head and 2d acceleration, possibly the most solidly designed video card ever, full open source drivers that do everything and the kitchen sink), but people like 3d acceleration.

Re:closed source != bad always

[noda132]

Because when nVidia wants to know something about ATI drivers it's only slightly less trivial to get the information when the driver source is closed than open.

The GNU GPL is about 15 years old now. That's precisely the kind of software abuse it's made for. If ATI released its drivers under the GPL, nVidia would have to do the same to copy any code from the ATI drivers.

Drivers aren't (supposed to be) what you pay for when you buy a piece of hardware; you pay for the hardware. The common excuse to keep drivers closed-source isn't the one quoted above; the concern is (supposedly) that ATI is afraid nVidia will notice architectural advantages of the Radeon series and integrate those into its hardware.

But what's the big deal? From drawing board to mass production is a matter of years; by the time a driver is released it's too late for the competition to integrate design ideas into its current product line.

What would open-source drivers bring, then? They'd bring the competition back to where it belongs: the hardware. Is GeForce or Radeon design better for most games? Nobody knows -- the driver hides how good the chips themselves are. (Personally, I'm under the impression ATI's chips are more powerful and their drivers are garbage.) Open-source drivers and open specs would benefit any company that released them; they'd also benefit the customer. And what if all hardware companies saw the light and released open-source drivers and open specs? Then they'd still compete much as they do today, and their customers would be better off.

ATI was waiting for debian

[Rushuru]

ATI was just waiting for xfree 4.3.0 to eventually enter debian

XFree86 4.3 support is not new.

[Anonymous Coward]

ATI has been offering drivers for XFree86 4.3 since some time late last year.

What's new is that there are new Linux drivers. No mention of whether they support GLX 1.3.

Not just RPM...

[OrangeHairMan]

from the readme:

Some notes for debian users:

The debian Linux distribution in most cases does not come with the
ability to handle rpm packages with the rpm tool. But there is a
tool called "alien" which allows you to convert rpm files into the
debian supported *.deb package format. Please consult your debian
documentation on how to operate this tool.

A typcial debian installation commandline will look like this:

dpkg -i <ati_package_name>.deb

In order to override complaints (which might be caused by an already
installed package "xlibmesa3" that also provides the file libGL.so.1.2)
please use this installation command line:

dpkg -i --force-overwrite <ati_package_name>.deb

Hopefully this helps!

Re:Not just RPM...

[Erratio]

There's support issues, once they release those packages they are responsible for them.

I'm running a computer with an ATI without a package management system but I installed RPM and forced an install of the package and it works fine. I think the RPM in this case is mostly just a way to archive the different parts of the driver (kernel module, X module, doc) without actually being too system specific, and considering it worked on my computer which is running all the latest, non-standard libraries, I'd guess that the only real variable to watch for is the X version which is the one they release different versions for. I did need to hack the driver in previous versions to get direct rendering to work though (I'll find out about the new one shortly).

Re:Not just RPM...

[Jeffrey Baker]

ATI doesn't support their driver on Linux, so there are no "support" issues at all.

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.

Re:Not just RPM...

[asciono]

This package is worth checking out if you use Debian
and want to use ATI's own drivers:
ATI Linux drivers packaged for Debian

Hm, anyone actually know what the big difference
between using ATI's closed source drivers or the
open sourced DRI-ones? (except not poluting your
karma ;>)
DRI (debs)

Well

[Bishop, Martin]

There is always rpm2tgz

However, open source == better bug finding/fixing

[betelgeuse-4]

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.

two points

[Lucretian]

1. ATI has offered drivers since last year.

2. the RPM has nothing to do with being closed source. It has a binary "IP" library that gets linked in when you compile it... if you want to install on a non-rpm system use alien or some other method of unrpming it, then compile and install. Yes, it's still closed source, but rpm the reason for this.

What I'm upset about is that they have all the hooks for 64bit amd support in the wrapper code, but the binary IP driver is not released for x86_64.

well...

[temojen]

1) I have a Radeon card in a Gentoo system. Gentoo doesn't use RPMs.

2) What if ATI has linked it against the wrong library version?

3) What if I get an Opteron?

Re:well...

[kinzillah]

Portage downloads the rpm, pulls the content out and puts the pieces where they need to go.

Re:well...

[gaj]

1. Quitcherbitchin. Gentoo can use RPMs just fine ... install RPM. Or is that too hard for an 3L337 63|\|700 |-|4x0r?
2. They link against glibc 2.2, so it works great with either 2.2 or 2.3 installations. I'm running it on a 2.3.2 system right now. This could become an issue ... but it is not at this time.
3. Then you should, at this time, get a damn NVIDIA card. This does suck a bit, and is a perfect example of where having competition is a good thing. OTOH, you could also use a 9100 or earlier Radeon and use the open-source drivers, or do withought 3D acceleration. You have options.

Sheesh. No one is holding a gun to your head saying "Buy an ATI video card or die!". If you don't like 'em, don't buy 'em.

Would it be better if both ATI and NVIDIA released their X servers as open-source? Hell yeah! OTOH, it is a very good thing that they are supporting Linux with current cards. The rest, we can work on with time.

Re:well...

[MoronGames]

You use gentoo? Try this:

emerge ati-drivers
fglrxconfig

You now have ATi drivers installed on your gentoo box and you're setting up the configuration file for them! Congratulations!

Several?

[ghostis]

several months after the originally proposed release date of April last year.

for large values of several apparently...

Whay has RPM got to do with anything?

[X-Nc]

Closed source is bad, there's no question about that. But what's the big deal about the release being in RPM format? Any competent Debian (or derivitive) user will easily be able to install it using alien and as for tgz binary distros, again, alien will convert.

RPM -> Good!
Closed source -> Bad!

How about AMD64 support?

[johannesg]

I checked out the site and cannot find anything regarding AMD64 support. Is it there?

Re:How about AMD64 support?

[The Analog Kid]

No, but nVidia does provide AMD64 support, so if you planning on building a Linux machine with an AMD64 CPU inside, I'd go with nVidia. Actually for Linux I would always go with nVidia, for right now anyway until ATI can pick up the pace, because a Radeon 9700 spits out FPS in GLX gears that is less than a GeForce 5200.

No suprise here

[theatre_freak]

I can't say I'm suprised by ATI's move to stay closed source. I've never been happy with anything ATI and most likely won't buy anything ATI. I've had a very bad experience with my ATI TV Wonder - sure they've updated their WinXP drivers, but the new drivers are a 2MB download, Multimedia Center (of which I only want the TV) is a 24MB download, and on top of that, you need Microsoft's Data Access Objects (a 17MB download) to make the parts of MMC that I don't even want to work. I've never gotten this combination to work, so I'm using the new drivers with an old version of MMC which mostly works, but doesn't respond well to Right-Clicks on the display area of the TV. I don't even dare to request tech support because they'll tell me to download the newest software and will be little help beyond that (which was the run-around I got when I was trying to make the card work in Win2k). Simply put, I love ATI's hardware, but their drivers are simply awful and for those of us who don't want the fluff, we still have to download the whole package and try to figure out how to install just what we want and still have everything work.

no Linux PPC support?

[Chuck Bucket]

I still see no support for Linux PPC, so the correct title for this article is: "ATI Releases Drivers for XFree 4.3.0 for x86 based systems only"

Thanks.

CBV

I think some Nvidia users are out to get ATI ....

[phoxix]

Why do I say this ?

Because this story is pretty much misinformed. Support for XFree86 4.3.0 is nothing new at all. It has been for quite sometime.

Additionally the previous article about ATI's support for linux/XFree86 has also been totally wrong as well.

And apparently there is a port of the driver to FreeBSD going under way .... (check out #ati on Freenode for more )

Sunny Dubey

The real question is:

[Qbertino]

Will they finally stop sucking?

To be honest, I don't give a damn if drivers are closed, open or whatnot, as long as they actually work and properly use the cards features.
That the Nvidia drivers are tied to the kernel is anoying, but bearable since they actually do work. Nvidias Linux support has been next to none - they've got high karma with me.
From ATI though, I've heard only negative stuff. Same from Matrox, whos Linux support seems to be an utter joke.
Can anybody confirm or debunk this about the new ATI drivers?

Re:The real question is:

[Jagasian]

What would be the point of Linux if it was all closed source? For many people, "open" is why they use software like Linux, and they want to minimize the amount of closed technology they use.

Re:The real question is:

[bolverk]

Same from Matrox, whos Linux support seems to be an utter joke.

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/ mg adrivers-3.0-src.tgz

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.

RPM2targz

[cuban321]

One suggested way to compile and install the ATI drivers is to use a package called rpm2targz.

Just run it on the rpm
untar the tar.gz to /
cd lib/modules/fglrx
cd build_mod
./make.sh
cd ..
./make_install.sh
Modify your XF86Config-4 or run fglrxconfig

That should be it. If you have AGP 8x you really should use Kernel 2.6.X. You can get it to work with 2.4.X but it's a pain. Search google for 2.4.X.

Daniel

Consider using DRI driver.

[Jacek Poplawski]

ATI driver is closed source. It means that after installing you will have one piece of system (kernel module!) without source available. It makes your system not 100% free. It is almost same situation like with nVidia. Almost, because ATI driver it's little different - without all win32 shit inside.

I am pro-Radeon, because ATI released almost-complete (without HyperZ!) specification for older Radeons (r100 and r200), but I am not going to buy their new cards (with r300). If you have old one - I recommend using open source DRI drivers.

confusing the meaning of free again?

[Anonymous Coward]

Think free-as-in-speech.

That's relevent regardless of the price of either
software or hardware.

Cost-as-in-money is not everything.

Too bad they lost me as a customer long ago

[xutopia]

cause NVIDIA was the first to release drivers for XFree and I have gotten used to NVIDIA line of products as a result.

OpenGL is used for more than games!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's used for 3D modelling, for which there are a few open source applications now. It can be used for some extreme 2D accelleration, too.

Displaying HD video will make many a XVideo overlay driver puke. Using OpenGL instead may work, and in some cases work faster.

Do I here someone saying "No one uses Linux for video, and certainly not HD"? You're wrong. Of course, the kind of shit we have to put up with from NVidia and ATI (and Matrox, too, I think) makes Linux a marginal choice for such applications.

The apologists are just too willing to defend the hardware manufacturers because they provided drivers for their platform. Anybody using another platform must be weird, eh? Anybody using hw-accelerated GL for something else than gaming is weird, too, of course.

Empathising with weird* people is hard, I know. But it won't hurt if you try.

* People with other interests than you

Re:No.

[iminplaya]

My, my...I didn't know that throwing around insults like that could garner so many points. Let me see if I can do it...Ummm...Errr..."You fart sucking, blithering idiot, I hope all your teeth fall out, except one...so you get a tooth ache!! How's that? Will it get me at least a three?

Now for something completely different...How 'bout them Cubs?...No, seriously, Everybody knows deep inside that open is better than closed, and cooperation is better than competition. It allows ideas to be built on other ideas to make it all better. You money grubbing corporate bastards :-)

Re:However, open source == better bug finding/fixi

[canajin56]

It's not even a question of what they WANT. If they are anything like nVidia, they CAN'T open them up because they licence technology from other firms, and can't publish their licenced code.

Not about stealing the technology

[AllenChristopher]

It isn't just about stelaing the technology. ATI and nVidia both have support for future features in their drivers. For example, nVidia just added PCIX support to their detonator drivers, even without any available cards on the market which need it.

Imagine actually looking at the comments of code that's designed for internal use at ATI... this goes way beyond reverse engineering. I'm sure the code for the drivers says all sorts of helpful things like "we use a 24-bit number here because we've committed to 24-bit floating point for the R-V4xx line in the forseeable future..."

That's a naive and simple example, but it demonstrates the concept. There's way more in that code than just the variables and algorithms you get from reverse-engineering. Stripping out all sensitive comments to open-source the drivers is an insane amount of work.

Once you have that information, sure, it's too late to incorporate it into your cards. nVidia isn't going to say "cancel the tape-out! we just read the comments in the new open-source driver!" But it might give their marketing people a lead on how to spin things. Open-source mean openness in more than source, and I can understand any conventional company being loathe to give in to that.

Non-OSS arguments don't hold water

[BigBuckHunter]

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

Re:Non-OSS arguments don't hold water

[DeathPenguin]

This guy seems to have it right:

"Suppose you create and design feature X into your chipset. You might find, via a lawsuit, that feature X is patented by company Y. I've talked to vendors who would like to open their hardware but are scared to do so for this very reason -- they might have designed a patented feature into their hardware without realizing it."

This should have been about v3.7.1 drivers, but...

[antdude]

v3.7.1 driver was PULLED a few days ago due to many complaints. See this ATI Linux driver forum for the complaints. I had issues with both v3.7.0 (Xscreensaver's OpenGL didn't work) and v3.7.1 (X server didn't start at all) drivers on my old Red Hat Linux 7.2 box.

Bullshit

[niko9]

...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,

They have had support for 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3 for the last six to eight months at least.

...users who have ATI Radeon cards can now benefit from an official release.

If you read the README these are all "officially unsuopported"

Unfortunately, ATI still insists on using RPM exclusively...

Again, if anybody cared to read their instructions, there are specific details on how to get these RPM's converted to debs via alien.

The only real news concerning ATI and Linux drivers isn't even mentioned here. I wonder how this passed as news, since these unofficial drivers have been out for the longest.

The real news is that ATI released 3.7.1 on the fourth. There was only one sentence in the changlelog: "Support added for the Radeon 9800XT"

Of course this, and the fact that that the new driver trashed alot of X servers, sent the Rage3d crown into a flame frenzy. ATI promised linux driver updates every two months, and after waiting and waiting (with numerous issued datailed here)
they added one ChipID for the 9800XT which results in some unstable X servers for people who don;t even have 9800XTs?

As a result the 3.7.1 drivers were pulled several hours after being released with no explanation given.

I'm happy they are making an effort, but their enthusiasm seems misguided at best. After declaring that they re writing the ATI drivers from scratch (as oppesed from upgrading the Schneider drivers) they rename them from 3.2 to 3.7? What? Shoudn't the rewritten drivers from scratch be labeled a alpha or beta release at best?

I currently have two radeon cards, and have gone back using the open source Xfree 2d driver and dual booting into windows for playing games until this mess gets sorted out.

As a matter of fact...

[rsilvergun]

someone is holding a gun to my head and saying "Buy an ATI video card or die!" Send help now.