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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.
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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.
Well, if there is a good video card support on linux, linux gaming will just strengthen. It isn't a godgiven that you can play games only on Vista.
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They're just trying to get them some press. Unfortunately Linux gamers are an edge case. People needing video card support on Linux above vanilla SVGA as a whole is an edge case.
Having solid drivers isn't just "an edge case". Go install the default ATI or Nvidia driver on a recent linux distro then upgrade it to a non open source one from the company. It's like day and night. I noticed a huge difference between having a default driver vs company made one, silly things like dragging a console with transparent background is no longer a pain, it's smooth. The desktop feels fast and I don't even have any 3d desktop installed.
Then you got things like multiple monitor support. My Feisty install without closed source drivers just wouldn't work. It kept resetting the screen resolution after reboots, wouldn't recognize my second monitor, I couldn't even force it, it was a black screen. Once I installed the closed source driver, shazam! All my video worries are gone. Now I am happily using a 2560 x 1024 dual monitor setup with hardware acceleration.
Also you got 3d desktops like Beryl. With eye candy being a major selling point in some operating systems, 3d features will become important if desktop linux wants to get more popular. I hope all graphic card companies will develop good drivers for Linux.
Last time I looked at the Intel driver source, there were a ton of calls into the video BIOS. Not something I would call an "Open Source" driver. This may have changed since then,- I really hope so.
Why is it important to have more source you might ask. Well, for one thing it would be really nice if we can get rid of the video BIOS altogether. A full source driver which shows how to switch video modes is a very good start to accomplish this (although not necessarily enough).
And then you might ask, why do we need to get rid of the video BIOS? Well, when evaluating graphics chips for an embedded systems, I found out that the video BIOS can spend an insanely long time initializing stuff and displaying stuff that we don't want/need (some like several seconds). In general, video BIOSs are over-engineered and do waaaay more than needed.
If you are aiming to build a near-instant-on system, and/or something that doesn't look like a PC, you want this sort of flexibility. If AMD steps up to the plate, that would be awesome.
Anybody got any more details? They talk about the lack of a timeline, but "graphics drivers" is also vague, and could mean 2D, or just another small subset of features.
I'm certainly not going to go out and start buying ATI cards until all the details are worked-out.
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True, right now they don't care. But that doesn't make it any less important to develop Free drivers.
Richard Stallman had his realization that Free software is necessary based on his experience with a printer driver.
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Nice to see you dont know squat about linux.
3d acceleration and the Video acceleration is used daily by EVERY linux user (short of text based server installs.
What you just said is as redicilous as saying "Vista users dont need anything but 2d Svga."
I run Wxvga all the time WITH 3d and guess what I dont play games in linux at work.
And I am not a "edge case" but a typical linux user.
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It sure is nice when GLX works and you can do CAD, modeling, simulations and 3D programming(OpenGL) on a Linux box. So there are practical uses beyond gaming for those fancy 3D cards.
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Pixel and vertex shaders are a whole new ball game. There's a lot of text on my screen. All of it drawn from truetype fonts. A truetype font is basically a series of bezier curves. Microsoft Research released a paper a few years back where each of these curves was approximated to a triangle. A vertex shader program then inspects each of the rendered triangles and corrects the error between the triangle and the bezier. This allows an entire font to be uploaded to the GPU and rendered at any resolution with very little CPU load or RAM usage (compare this with Apple's hack of just storing a table of glyphs in the video RAM, which doesn't scale very well).
Pixel shaders can be used for a lot of things. With pixel shaders you can perform a lot of convolutions in hardware, giving some nice effects. You can use a pyramid algorithm to perform a number of things, like bi-cubic filtering, blurring, etc in a fraction of a second.
Sure, you could do a lot of these on the CPU, but the GPU is going to do them a lot faster, and probably use less power (important for mobile users).
Even without needing the 3D support, it's useful to have all of the features working correctly. Power management is a big one, since the kernel needs to be able to save the state of the GPU somewhere before turning it off, and Linux uses a lot of hacks to try to avoid needing to do this.
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Why should software development companies waste money developing games for Windows when they could get a far larger market share by making games for Wii, Xbox 360, PS3, DS, PSP, etc.? The PC gaming market is much smaller than the console games market, and Nintendo is helping widen the gap with the Wii and DS which appeal to non-gamers as well.
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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?
You've missed 1 key point: 5 years ago!
Linux is a MUCH better desktop OS than it was 5 years ago. Coincidentally, that was about the same time I tried to use Debian as a desktop. It stunk and I quickly dropped it. Then 2 years ago, I found reason to try it out again. Slackware was pretty good, but still iffy for a desktop.
Now I've got Kubuntu. It's amazing, and definitely a good desktop OS. The home PC I have ordered was chosen based on the idea that it would only run Linux, and Windows didn't matter. (This one is going to be my 'game' PC in the living room now.)
Loki was too early. If they tried the same thing now, they'd have a LOT better success.
As for the 'waiting' issue... Was that the only issue? Or did Loki fail to advertise that they were going to be releasing that game in a few months? Because if I didn't know about it, I'd just pick it up for Windows, assuming Linux would never get it. Maybe there were other issues as well, that don't come to mind immediately.
Loki didn't prove anything except that they didn't make it.
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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.
I don't think everyone understands the argument here. There is a problem with closed source drivers. It's not just ideology. Closed source drivers means you can end up with no drivers for a device for your version of the kernel. Even if drivers for some different kernel version exists. A good example of this is old devices. If the manufacturer still exists, they probably don't care to do the work to update drivers for a device they no longer sell. Maybe there should be a device/kernel interface that stays the same for all time, but I think as a rule, people want the best interface possible, with open source drivers so devices can be kept up. You then of course get the advantage of open source so you can fix/work-round bugs (or improve it!).
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.
What about that optical mouse you're using?
[looks down...]
Logitech.
[looks over at the 'ol Windows98 box...]
Logitech.
[goes downstairs, looks at wife's laptop...]
Logitech.
'Nuff said.