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A Look at the State of ATI Linux Drivers
Linux PaPa writes "LinuxHardware.org has just posted a great new review on the current state of ATI drivers under Linux. The review is specifically a look at the Connect3D's Radeon X800 and it exposes many of ATI's current problems in their latest drivers. While the drivers seem to have plenty of speed to them now, some stuff still just doesn't work."
if it does 80x24, it's enough for me, everything beyond that is just bonus
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
On a laptop, the state is that you go to ATI's website, dig around for a bit, find a page for downloading the drivers, get a note saying that there are no laptop drivers and that you should contact your laptop OEM (and exactly how many of them are distributing LINUX drivers for their system even for OS-less laptops like my own?), search the web, find a websit with a guy who says he modified the ATI linux drivers to operate on a number of cards, including the Mobility Radeon 9700 128MB, take the guy at his word and trust that they're fine, download and recompile your laptop's kernel, download the source for the ATI driver, download another source bundle, compile the two along with your new kernel, say a prayer and hope that everything works.
For the life of me, I don't know why everyone isn't running linux already. Hmm...!
ATI's development cycle is far too slow for linux. They develop for it to work on the current *stable* kernel, rather than the mm kernel or the development kernel. Naturally when it comes out, the development kernel is the stable kernel by that time, and it doesn't work any more. This wouldn't be as bad a problem if they didn't use heavily deprecated kernel features when they're developing (if you can make it build, look at the amount of deprecated errors).
.. 6x slower in my experience. I think it was based off of really old XFree radeon drivers or something and they haven't changed it.
They also use CRAP 2d drivers
Their state with windows and linux laptop drivers confused me at first, but their linux drivers work on mobility products, and windows drivers require a hack. My laptop manufacturer doesn't release drivers so I needed to get them to get the updated drivers.
I don't understand why they don't have a nightly driver release.. and they could help by releasing everything that they possibly can opensource and a binary module (see the madwifi drivers for an example), then get a load of OSS developers who know X really well to maintain them. The madwifi drivers work really well for most parts, ATI should learn from them and nvidia.
I spent days trying to get stupid ATI 64-bit drivers working on AMD64 Linux. Don't bother. Just buy an nVidia card and be done with it.
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It seems odd to write a review of hardware for linux and only consider proprietary, binary-only drivers. The R300 project has progressed to the point that they now list what is left to do, and its shorter than the list of what is already done. Many games are playable, and it looks like they could use some testers who have a wider range of cards.