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AMD Promises Open Source Graphics Drivers
MoxFulder writes "Henri Richard, AMD's VP of sales, has promised to deliver open-source drivers for ATI graphics cards (recently acquired by AMD) at the recent Red Hat Summit. A series of good news for proponents of open-source device drivers. In the last year, Intel, the leading provider of integrated graphics cards, has opened their drivers as well. But ATI and NVidia, the only two players in the market for high-performance discrete graphics cards, have so far released only closed-source drivers for their cards. This has created numerous compatibility, stability, and ethical problems for users of Linux and other open source OSes, and prompted projects like Nouveau to try and reverse-engineer NVidia drivers. Hopefully AMD's decision will put pressure on NVidia to release open-source drivers as well!"
I'm sorry, I could not read the summary. I have worked in R&D... I got as far as "VP of sales has promised" and had a panic attack.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
No, some other users just want fully operational 2D graphics with dual head support. More especially for dual DVI cards where the external TMDS is not supported under X.
Agreed... this is why I was excited about possibly having open-source drivers, and posted this article. My current box has onboard NVidia, and a low-end ATI discrete PCIe card... frankly, I can't wait for *one* of them to have open drivers. Although using the binary drivers improves 3D performance and a lot of strange display bugs, as you point out, it's a huge pain to keep them up-to-date with kernel upgrades since they can't be bundled with the main kernel. I don't like putting a big binary blob in my kernel, which by all reports is out-of-date with respect to a lot of other kernel subsystems, and may open up security holes.
I don't do 3D anything (word processing, programming, web browsing mainly), but baseline unaccelerated SVGA is definitely *not* acceptable: 2D graphics acceleration is necessary for a smooth and productive desktop experience. The open-source 2D acceleration is actually pretty good at this point, but of course it simply DOES NOT WORK with a lot of the latest ATI cards in particular.
The current pace of open-source driver development is positively glacial, largely because most of the people who have sufficient documentation to easily improve the drivers are under NDA. Read this incredibly frustrating blog entry from a developer who's under NDA with ATI... using only a few hundred lines of code, he has patched the open-source Radeon driver to support most of the newer ATI cards... but ATI has spun its wheels for months without allowing him to release the code.
My bicyles
* You != an average Linux user.
* Loki Software proved the lack of market for Linux games 5 years ago when they shut down in 2002.
I think we also have to take into account the fact that the Linux landscape has changed drastically in the last five years. How popular was the iPod in 2002?
Actually, you are incorrect. Loki Software died mainly because of managerial incompetence and mismanagement. You can read about some of that here.
And, as others have pointed out, the Linux desktop has matured a lot in the last 5 years. Even if Loki died because of a lack of customers (which is not the case), the same would not necessarily happen today.
With Compiz, Beryl, and XGL, excellent 3D graphics support has become a mainstream issue. Furthermore, Linux is widely used in science and engineering, and those users use excellent 3D graphics as well.