ATI Committed To Fixing Its OSS Problems

Sits writes "Chris Blizzard blogged from the Red Hat summit that an ATI marketing spokesman said, from the stage, that ATI knows it has a problem with open source and is committed to fixing it. Does this mean ATI will finally resolve alleged agpgart misappropriation, and fast track the release of open source 2D drivers on its latest cards while releasing specifications for its mid-range cards? Or is ATI only concerned with fixes to its binary driver to maintain feature parity with competitors?"

Comments

Likely binary drivers only.

[danomac]

I'd wager a guess they're going to fix the binary drivers only.

Why would they open a spec when they can compete with the binary drivers?

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[Shazow]

Actually, it's more likely that the reason all their software is locked away and kept secret is because it's probably infringing on numerous software patents. When Joe Sixpack can go down to the patent office and register a doubly linked list as his own invention, lots of possibilities for lawsuits open up.

I did some research into this for a course, but I don't have sources to cite off the top of my head. Definitely something worth looking into.

- shazow

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[LWATCDR]

"I'm sure that they could even get a performance boost if they let millions of hackers with tons of free time optimize things for them."
I am not.
1. Millions of hackers? There isn't a single FOSS project that millions of hackers have contributed too.
2. There are very few people with the experience to write a good much less great 3d driver.
3. Even with the specs I am guessing that the majority of contributions will be security or code clean up and not performance optimizations.

Does this mean .......

[Timesprout]

Why dont you ask ATI what it means. How is Slashdot supposed to be privy to ATI's roadmap?

People tend to say OSS support ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... when they only mean 'Linux support'. And personally, I don't consider closed source binaries OSS support at all. AMD has been good about making the information available for open-source programmers so their chips can be supported. Perhaps their purchase of ATI will force a shift in the corporate culture there too. Well, we can hope.

Re:Does this mean hardware hacking is dead?

[the_humeister]

Uh, people have been working hard to understand how the hardware works in order to write open source drivers. See here for example. The problem is that ATI doesn't open up the specs for their recent cards so there are very few and tedious avenues to having open source drivers (eg. reverse engineer the binary drivers, probing hardeware settings, etc). As far as I know, there's practically full opne source 3D drivers for R100-R200 based cards, somewhat full 3D drivers for R300 based cards, and no support for later models. So the OSS community is working on the driver issues, it takes time without documentation.

Re:Open Source supporters within ATI

[krbvroc1]

So much for showing a little leadership? Basically, we will just follow nVidia. I've got 1U Supermicro rackmount servers that have ATI 'Rage MX' chipsets on them and there is not even a solution for these chips other than a very slow unaccelerated driver. They don't even have a working binary driver.

ATI's lack of driver quality and commitment has always been a problem for me. I went from 3dfx to Nvidia and have never personally purchased an ATI product specifically because of their poor Linux support.

Re:Does this mean hardware hacking is dead?

[Ruie]

So far I'm hearing "commercial company hasn't written Linux drivers for their card". That's a legitimate complaint, but if the OSS community's reaction is to whine about it on cheesy blogs rather just hack the hardware...?

No, it is not, but it is strictly for pleasure only.

You see, 3d cards are complicated. On top of that the hardware itself if often finicky with lockups to the point that they should really be considered bugs. So, you can only start once your got the hardware in your hands (which means after release) and with lots of work, at best you will have something semi-working a year later. It will be at least another year before the drivers mature so everyone can use them mostly without lockups. In the meanwhile ATI will release a few more variations and, if you are aiming for comprehensive support, you are back to square one.

If ATI wants to be nice to Open Source it means releasing partial specifications (at the very least) before the card is ready so that all their cards work with 2d, Xv and multi-monitor/multi-card when they are in stores (or a couple of months later) and having full specifications no later than 6 months after release.

Anything else and we are back to scrounging for older well-supported cards - which also happen to be a good deal cheaper and have less of a margin for ATI.

The latest card I have is Radeon 1600 - and given a choice I would gladly go back to R300 (or better yet - Rage Pro) if only those cards supported the resolutions I need and PCI express.

IP

[pedestrian crossing]

They have already sold the card, so it doesn't matter as far as revenue who writes the best driver. Good open drivers might help sell cards. I would sure choose a good card with a good open driver.

I think it's an IP issue. They've bought into some fundamental patented IP, the license forbids releasing driver source (or it's something they have patented and it is counted as an asset on their Balance Sheet), and the patent covers something so integral to their design that it isn't worth the R&D it would take to get around it.