Insight Into AMD's Linux Driver Development

Cowards Anonymous writes "It's no secret that ATI Technologies has had a rough time in the past delivering display drivers that met the expectations of their customers. When ATI started out producing a FireGL and Radeon Linux driver they for some time were greatly behind NVIDIA's feature-rich driver. The early ATI Linux driver had lacked essential functionality such as PCI Express and x86_64 architecture support and was also affected by stability and performance problems — not to mention a great deal of bugs."

Comments

rough start

[phrostie]

when i switched from NVidia to ATI, it was a rough start.
for the longest time i couldn't get the driver to build/install, then one day everything just worked!
i can't tell you which version it was, but from then on, i've had no problems or complaints.

an open driver would be nice, but even still, my compliments to them.

ATI and Fedora 7 / X.Org 1.3

[harrypelles]

I made the same mistake as many Fedora users - jumping (to Fedora 7) before looking. I'm not poking at Fedora here, on the contrary, I am a loyal Fedora user. It's ATI I'm upset with. ATI released a new fglrx driver (version 8.37) since Fedora 7's tests and final release that also does not work with X.Org 1.3. We're all sitting around waiting for the 8.38 which ATI claims will be compatible. And don't even get me started on ATI's absent AIGLX support for Linux. My next card will nVidia.

Re:The best way...

[the_humeister]

If you're using some sort of Linux/*BSD/etc, you shouldn't have to worry because X.org has had mostly full and useable R100, R200, and recently R300 open source drivers for quite some time now. They're decent. I've been playing Unreal Tournament (and variants) without problems. The only issue is visuals with Doom 3 do to S3 Texture compression being patented. If you're using Windows, well good luck!

Intel has not release docs

[dmoore]

> Intel "getting it" and releasing Open Source drivers and full specs.

Actually, Intel has not released docs for their GMA X3000. Their current stance is that the driver is the documentation. That's fine and good, except the driver is still very incomplete (missing OpenGL features, no XvMC, no tv-out, etc.). See here:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2007-Ma y/024582.html

Re:what a joke

[revengebomber]

The community COULD do their own drivers, but the specs aren't available. Everything about how to interface with the card would have to be found via reverse engineering.

I'm fairly sure the reason the specs aren't open, is because it would disclose some "secrets" about how the companies optimize their cards.