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.

[InsaneProcessor]

The video card industry is so secretive with thier software. ATI even locks the BIOS so after POST you cannot access the card to download it. They are so afraid that the competiition will find out how they work or that someone else will build a better driver. This is the only part of the PC buisiness that is this large, yet this secretive. I thing that they are just overly paranoid.

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[div_2n]

Or maybe they have some sloppy hacks to try to improve frame rates for certain games so that they score better in comparisons. Anyone remember the Quake 3 fiasco that ATI was involved with?

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.

[Cal Paterson]

1. Millions of hackers? There isn't a single FOSS project that millions of hackers have contributed too.

Pedantic behavior rarely convinces anyone.

2. There are very few people with the experience to write a good much less great 3d driver.

You see, that's funny, you get a whole set of guys who are busy writing what many consider complex programs. Here's one you often see doing fairly well. Yet obviously, these same people are totally unable to write a working graphics driver. Even though they have written just about every other kind of driver between them, and had them overwhelmingly beat the crap out of the closed-source sector.

3. Even with the specs I am guessing that the majority of contributions will be security or code clean up and not performance optimizations.

So? Security in binary graphical drivers has been a real problem in the past. (note the 6th or so post down, with the link).

Does this mean .......

[Timesprout]

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

Open Source supporters within ATI

[plcurechax]

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.

Re:Open Source supporters within ATI

[dpilot]

I have owned or made purchasing decisions for 6 3D graphics cards.
* 2 were Matrox G400s, based on their being the first mainstream card to get 3D hardware support under Linux. I even ran Utah-GLX on one.
* 1 was an ATI Radeon 8500LE, based on price/performance and the existence of the open source R200 drivers.
* 3 are nVidia cards, since there's no competitive contemporary open source 3D any more, and the quality of nVidia's binary seems to be better. There are reverse-engineering efforts on both, but it's unclear who will be the clear winner on this.

So I *have* put my money where my mouth is, and will continue to do so.

I also recommend hardware for friends and co-workers, and this is a factor. Even for a friend who is only going to use Windows, if all else is equal I would advise that he "reward" the company for its Linux support. Notice that in this case I said, "all else is equal," and let the friend know why I gave the advice I did.

Marketing?

[markov_chain]

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 :)

I'll believe it when....

[wowbagger]

I'll believe that AMD/ATI is fixing their problems when I can have a driver that:

1. Supports XvMC
2. Supports the tuner on my All-in-Wonder, either via XVideo or Video For Linux
3. Has reasonable 3D performance without locking up (GoogleEarth will kill my card dead in seconds, requiring a hard power off to fix it.)
4. Has reasonable 2D acceleration.
5. Runs on the current release of the kernel - on i386 and i386-64 AT LEAST.
6. Supports PCIe cards

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.

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:People tend to say OSS support ...

[TheRaven64]

Mod that post right up. Intel are doing it the right way, by releasing DRI drivers. Any operating system that wants to support DRI can then use the Intel DRI drivers. Once the DRI code is running on a kernel, it's just a matter of porting the small glue layer for each card (or card family) and then the bulk of the driver can be compiled and used whatever the underlying architecture is.

Even the nVidia binary drivers have wider support than ATi, since they work on OpenSolaris and FreeBSD as well as Linux.

Current State

[scubanator87]

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.

Re:Does this mean hardware hacking is dead?

[fruey]

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?

Dell ....

[taniwha]

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 .....

Re:Dell ....

[LWATCDR]

That was my thought. But it gets worse. Dell is also a big and relatively new AMD customer. Intel's integrated graphics solution works very well under Linux. So for the low end Linux solution Intel maybe the system of choice. The Dell guys might start crossing ATI and AMD off the list. Intel offers easier on stop shopping and a more politically correct FOSS system.

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.

Oh Oh!

[shking]

A friend of mine recently had his dog "fixed". What, exactly, does ATI intend?

In other news

[diegocgteleline.es]

Announcing free software drivers for the new Intel 965GM Express Chipset

ATI, NVIDIA: fuck you. Open source graphic drivers are possible, period.

Open? Does not play with DRM, so forget it.

[Bearhouse]

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.

Re:Ok I am stupid ...

[644bd346996]

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.

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.