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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?"
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?
Why dont you ask ATI what it means. How is Slashdot supposed to be privy to ATI's roadmap?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
If you read the original article that all of this questioning is derived from you realize the article summary has more content than the linked story. This means aproximately nothing. ATI pays lip service to open source software news at 11.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
I know from talking to them at the Ottawa Linux Symposium a couple of years ago that the technical people within ATI were keen to support Linux the best that the could, but said they were mainly limited by management / legal to aim for competing with whatever nVidia offered the Linux community. If nVidia offered a complete open source driver, they would be pressured to do the same.
an ATI marketing spokesman said, from the stage, that ATI knows it has a problem with open source and is committed to fixing it.
:)
There goes the good old problem solving by marketing. Wait until their developers hear about this
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
This is *the* limiting factor which has prevented me from buying a new computer - any new machine would be an i386-64 with PCIe video, and right now the only real choice there would be Intel graphics.
www.eFax.com are spammers
... 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.
I am currently running the *newst* ati binary drivers and although they have added the Catalyst Control center (improvement ofer the old fglrx control center) mine (and a few other people i know using the same driver) cant seem to get dual monitor to work. And with the Opensource ati driver atleast AIGLX works but still no dual head display.
ATI needs to step up the quality of their coding and there is no *good* reason why ati does not support AIGLX and why their 8.35.5 is having problems with dual monitors. Because my laptop uses ati and i was so displeased with its state of drivers forced me to go with nvidia when i built my desktop a year ago. Im sure many people using Linux stay clear of ati when possible for the same reason. When and if they get their stuff together it will receive a warm welcome...if they do it right that is.
Also why is it people need programs like envy to install their drivers. Hopefully ATI and nvidia will pick up the slack hear and make it easer to install the drivers.
Hack the hardware? Have you any idea how complicated graphics cards and 3D acceleration is when you have no specification on the hardware at all?
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
suddenly Dell is shipping boxes with Linux .... a big customer to ATI .... and Dell is talking to Ubuntu .... "How do we know which of our boxes work well for Linux, will cause us the least amount of tech support grief' ... Ubuntu guy says "well these drivers don't work so well .... they're not well supported by their manufacturers" ..... Dell guy starts crossing boxes with ATI cards off the list .... and tells ATI marketting who start worrying that Dell will start to not buy ATI at all .....
I doubt ATI will fast track anything for OSS...
they may eventually solve SOME problems but I sincerely doubt they'll be throwing a team on resolving all of the issues resulting from using one of their cards with Linux.
"Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
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.
A friend of mine recently had his dog "fixed". What, exactly, does ATI intend?
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
I own an ATI 9800 PRO graphics card. It's a great piece of hardware. But "I need a good driver", which is translated to: If they don't release an outstanding driver in the next few weeks, my next card will be nVidia. Or better... If they don't release an outstanding full open-source driver in the next few weeks, my next card will be nVidia. Yes. I know that nVidia drivers aren't outstanding, and aren't open source. But I've been stuck in the bad side so long, that I won't be satisfied with "just the same as the competition".
Announcing free software drivers for the new Intel 965GM Express Chipset
ATI, NVIDIA: fuck you. Open source graphic drivers are possible, period.
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.
How do we feel about Microsoft's decision to exclude open source drivers by requiring signatures on everything in XP/Vista? Would we want them to rule out GPLed software based on MFC and .Net? It's no better for Linux to enforce a particular license for drivers or impose license restrictions on KDE/Qt apps. An operating system should be license-neutral for any applications and plugins it supports. A user should not be limited in what kind of hardware he can buy for his Linux computer.
right now, as much as I dislike it - nvidia IS the linux owner for HTPC use.
all the howtos talk about the nvidia binary (sigh) driver and how it helps (but isn't a full solution) to mpeg motion accel. in hardware.
but with ati, there IS no solution. "don't use ATI" if you use linux and want fast video for home theater use.
I bought an ati card for the windows side of my htpc design - but I won't be buying them again until they show an xvmc driver for linux.
its just a shame they ignore unix like that; especially in the days when HTPC building is really starting to get popular.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
While everyone is harping about ATI's past sins, I'd like to thank ATI for committing to fixing those problems. We should commend (and purchase from) companies that make our lives easier (I'm looking at you, Broadcom...)
Apparently (rumour alert), the newer Radeons are very similar, in terms of interface, to earlier ones. Porting the drivers over requires about a 100-line diff; most of the changes are register locations, the actual semantics are similar. Unfortunately, the person who wrote the diff did so under NDA, and ATi didn't allow him to release it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I attended the Red Hat summit last year. Lots of good information (there were a ton of talks about Xen, a good one about the finer points of LVM, etc), but the price wasn't worth making it a yearly thing.
That being said, I think the conference has the potential to quickly degrade to LinuxWorld-level, and this announcement doesn't surprise me. Companies will come out of the woodwork and start screaming "Yaaa, we like Linux! Hooray for open source!" for a week, but then not do anything until the next conference/expo rolls around.
(On a related note, the last notebook I bought came with Intel graphics. I specifically chose this because I didn't want to deal with the headache of ATI and Nvidia's binary drivers. Intel is no saint, but at least having full 3D drivers in Xorg is nice.)
Ever heard of, "Certified Output Protection Protocol (COPP), Protected Video Path Output Protection Management (PVP-OPM),
Protected Video Path User Accessible Bus (PVP-UAB) and Protected Broadcast Driver Architecture (PBDA..."
All lovely things that Microsoft and ATI (will/do) use to piss you off, and make connecting all of your expensive new PC & AV kit virtually impossible.
Better binary drivers? Maybe.
Genuinely 'open' architecture that would enable the OSS community to bypass (more easily) current and future DRM, while still being able to view the result on the lastest hardware? No way.
I had an Ati Radeon Moblility 7500 which I used on Ubuntu Edgy Eft. I used the open-source drivers and it worked fine. 3D support was kinda iffy in some places, but it worked all right. That being said, I now own an nVidia Geforce Go 7300 and using the restricted drivers, it works like a champ. I don't give a rat's ass if the thing is closed or open, if nVidia is committed to releasing a high quality driver for Linux, I'm going to side with them. I can't speak for the Ati binary driver, but given that my old video card wasn't even supported by the binary driver, I'd have to say to hell with Ati...
Short answer: no.
Long answer: No. X11+GLX is very different from GDI+DirectX. In almost all cases, it would be easier to reverse-engineer the hardware, rather than wrap the driver api. Also, it would probably be impossible to use windows graphics drivers in a secure manner. And the extra translation layer would kill performance. If you are going to reverse-engineer the drivers, you might as well look at the hardware info, and not the software api.
Note that in some cases, it is possible to use Windows drivers on a *nix operating system. The NDIS network card driver api is well documented, and is supported by projects for Linux and FreeBSD.
They don't give any f**ck to Linux drivers. More than 5 years, oss people begging them to do something for Linux drivers.
So ? DONT BUY.
Thats simple.
[My english is better than most other people's Turkish, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
You know, cause complaining to their Linux department has accomplished jack-shit in the past 2 years. The peon transfers me to his manager, and his manager says "I'm really sorry, I have some very exciting news to tell you, but I can't under our NDA". I asked him if he could generalize the news, to see if it maybe fixes the problems I'm having. He says he will liaze with me to ensure I get a proper response from their Linux team, that will somehow keep me from selling my (STILL) $650 X1900. Anyways, I would kill to be able to install Beryl as easy as I do on my Dell D610. It's the slowest crappiest laptop alive, and yet with the new Intel drivers, Beryl runs awesome! Anyways, I'll keep everyone posted, but like we've been doing for the past 2 years or so, don't hold your breath.
They're a small team working on the drivers, the OpenGL group as a whole. And they're laying off 5% of their workforce to placate the stock market on dismal earnings- do YOU think they're going to carry through on that commitment in the next 6-24 months? I don't. I'm not commending anyone for anything until I see results- while Matthew Tippet's team (small one- very small) has done amazing things for us (I wish the man's team was PROPERLY staffed up!!) he's hamstrung by the upper management's insistence on DirectX over everything else (If you talk with the DevRel people, unless you're on Linux or MacOS they will try to talk you into DirectX over OpenGL, even if you state plainly that you're gunning for cross-platform on a title or other application.), they do NOT get applause yet from at least myself. They're only slightly better than Broadcom.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
In reality, they're not. The API driving them IS. They're just multiprocessor stream engines these days. Pretty much little more than a 4, 8, 16, etc. way SMP machine for all intents and purposes. I should know, I worked on driver work for one of those "complex" beasties- the driver's feature set is what is really complicated and much of that has been done by the DRI crowd and just needing refining.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Read my Journal for the scoop, but it works like this: they (ATI) know their OSS/Linux support is "teh suck," but choose not to fix it. Why? The answer is simple: why should they? In the 3D realm, you have two choices ATI or nVidia. That's it. Linux isn't where the bread-n-butter is, Windows is where the revenue is. As a business, you go where the money is, not where your heart may lead you.
What's more, it may not be just one component that's truly sucky: All I know is that ATI's FGLRX + 3D + Xorg = failure. Their driver may be fine, there could be an issue with Xorg and ATI together, or some unseen combo that nobody is looking at--or it would have been fixed. So, as a result you have, really, only one good choice for Linux 3D, and that's nVidia. Nvidia knows this and loves it. ATI chooses to chase the other guy rather than fix things and gain new converts.
In a month or two when nothing has come of this, at least you'll know why. Pay no attention to the flapping heads of ATI until they actually DO something.
We've been using OpenGL and Linux on ATI cards for our arcade game for over a year now. We're facing a major hurdle, though. AGP hardware is getting harder and harder to find in quantity, and the fglrx drivers don't correctly support vblank in the PCIx cards they have. We're trying to use the commercial end to get pressure on them through the buyers, but it's slow going.
When they can't be bothered to get their drivers to pay attention to vblank properly, you know it's not their top priority.
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.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
At this stage, to buy anything except an Intel GMA X3000 is madness. Intel are delivering fully Free/Open solutions that are powerful enough for anyone except hard core gamers (and said games don't exist on Linux anyway) and CAD people.
They're also significantly cheaper and more power efficient than the stuff being put out by Nvidia and ATI.
There are open-source R300 drivers that cover the 9500 up to x850 range of cards. I've used it for on old 9600XT AGP card (AGP chip) and HIS-overclocked X800 AGP card (PCIe chip with PCIe-to-GP bridge). The performance seem to be acceptable for my needs - which is surprising, knowing that R300 driver was completely developed from reverse engineering.
Recently the driver has been included in the official DRI tree. Most distro use it to provide open-source 3D acceleration. It is the default drivers for near every GPL-compatible Beryl/Compiz LiveCD (like Kooraa, for exemple) and function well enough with them (the same can't be said for official binary drivers).
As usual you should stop focusing on the hardware maker - who doesn't { have the possibility to / want to } throw resources at an OS that represents only a smaller fraction of their market share.
You should instead seek what has been produced by the OSS community - through large-scale collaboration they often manage to put out some marvels.
There no way one could except ATI to open-source drivers. They may have problems with code in their drivers that wasn't produced in house and that can't be opened cheaply.
BUT what AMD/ATI realy need to do is to help the DRI/FreeDesktop guys develop their own driver, and for that they need to document a little bit their chips. The best thing could do to the OSS community isn't trying to make their BLOB drivers less borked. The best thing would be to provide list of registers and samples so the community could write a R500 driver.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Up to R4xx (Radeon X8x0. The R5xx family (X1300 and up) is radically different. It's still called radeon, but it doesn't share the radeon core. In fact it doesn't have a 2D core at all. It is a purely 3D chips that use triangle operation and similar to do 2D blits.
The open source R300 driver had been adapter to function with R400 cards too (up to X850) (and has been included in the mainstream DRI on freedesktop since then) - it works well, that's what I use.
But an R500 driver would require writing a new (3D-only) driver from scratch. Which is difficult and slow because ATI doesn't provide any documentation at all for their hardware, not even under NDA.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]