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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."
And they still are.
to build a customer base is to alienate your existing customer base. I bought an R200-based laptop a couple years ago. ATI decided to just not support those cards in their fglrx driver package one day. Why would I buy from a company who won't continue support for their own products for more than a couple years? I will make every effort to never support them again until they get customer/product support in order. NVIDIA, bravo.
TODO - Insert Creative/Witty Signature
What is the purpose a two months long QA process, when the result is broken drivers either way?
The long QA process *guarantees* that the drivers break on new kernels.
The long QA process isn't worth jack shit. The recent 8.37 drivers locks up my computer 100% of the time.
Did ATI need 3 months to QA a version check patch for the xserver-xorg-core version number, just to release drivers that no longer work?
With such shitty drivers, I would think it would be better to at least release early and release often.
Whatever. They don't need to do any work. All they need to do is open up the specs, and people will do all the work for them. People aren't bitching that the drivers don't work, people are bitching because they aren't allowed to improve them.
There's a whole community out there willing to do all the software work from scratch, but they don't have the resources to create the hardware. The hardware developers somehow see this need to provide the software themselves, instead of taking advantage of the community, but then go and do a shoddy job of it. That's why people are annoyed by the whole thing. It could be so much better, with very little effort from ATI, but they steadfastly refuse to play nice, forcing developers to resort to reverse engineering. Same goes to Nvidia by the way, but at least they seem to be a bit more competent in Linux/X.org driver development.
This whole argument is just a big excuse. We don't want excuses, we want some damn drivers.
--- someone who's been buying Nvidia since he realized that ATI doesn't work as well on Linux.
The article is a long excuse explaining why AMD/ATI are unable to release decent GNU/Linux drivers. That's interesting enough as far as it goes: AMD/ATI and Nvidia both have crap closed, proprietary drivers which don't work well, make kernel updgrading difficult and are unauditable for security. So why bother with them? Further ATI have a history of dragging their ass and blocking the release of Free drivers,
Why bother with this crap? Just get an Intel GMA X3000 integrated motherboard and save time, power, money and hassle due to Intel "getting it" and releasing Open Source drivers and full specs. (You'll probably also be able to benefit from their free wireless drivers.
If you're into hardcore gaming then you're probably running a PS3 or an Xbox on the side anyway.
Basically, TFA says that "ATI has a release cycle". They even have an unofficial bugzilla and an unofficial wiki. Oh, and they'll drop R200 support too. And all that's supposed to make better drivers for Linux one day. I really wish they'd go the Intel way: hire some top-notch developers, give them specs and make them do Free drivers.
Sigh, yet another general statement without supporting evidence. I think your post is a sly bit of astroturfing for NVidia. ATI has had WHQL ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHQL_Testing ) certified new driver releases for years now. NVidia has only recently been able to get their new releases WHQL qualified. Sure, there is more to drivers, but it indicates that ATI has had a solid development, testing, and qualification regimen in place for a long time.
Perhaps because 'Linuzz' is open it is easy to see where the problem lies. With Vista you get huge binary blob and if it's broken you don't know if it is the drivers or Vista -- you can't debug it and look at the source so you call MS tech support and wait 6 months for a service pack or MS tells you to call ATI/AMD and you wait 6 month for a fix. Binary drivers suck that's the problem here...
I have to say I'm not finding anything insightful in the linked article. It's just a long winded way of saying, "The drivers aren't very good, but AMD/ATI is working hard on it." which we most of us likely already knew. It would have been good to see some insights on what AMD did to improve the driver development process, what impact the open source announcement made, etc.
Yeah, in the same way that Mazda is a part of the big Ford company. But you wouldn't submit and article called "How Ford Builds Cars" and then cover only the Mazda factor's stereo installation.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Dell has solved this problem by including the Intel stuff instead for their Linux offering. It's time for ATI to release their drivers as OSS.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
The article basically says "thanks for these power point slides, AMD/ATI, I'll kiss your F**** asses in my article" Seriously, that article sucked.
Also, when they say that customers don't realize how much work goes into drivers, is that an excuse? I don't care how much work goes into drivers, I know it's hard to do. It's hard to develop the cards to begin with, and to engineer them. The entire process is hard and full of work. The bottom line is that if you can't produce working drivers for a product that you created and manufacture and sell, that you are in the wrong business and wasting my time.
So you had a rough time gettint the driver to even compile, let alone instal or even (gasp!) work. Then, one day, it just started working.
So far, so good - this is a typical "ATI on Linux" story, but of the happy-ending sort (which are rather rare, from what I saw so far).
What I do not understand is which way do they deserve your compliments for providing such sub-par software? I'd bring the card right back to the shop I bought it, demand my money back, and buy a nVidia! I haven't had a problem with nVidia drivers for years now.
WHQL does not guarantee ease of use, installation or compatibility. It just means that it tells Windows what it wants to hear instead of what it might need to hear.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
That article took ages to get approval from the management at ATi (~two months) - if they're that paranoid about releasing information on their release cycle then I don't think we stand a chance of getting any open source/specs from them.
Everything works? So you can use Firefox at a reasonable speed when logged in as a second user now? You can use Beryl now? Those things sure don't work on the X1300 I bought (a horrible mistake) a couple months ago.
It's really absurd - if they'd just release the programming info for their hardware the X.org drivers would support this stuff inside a week.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Hmmm
A Windows compatibility rating is frequently not worth the paper it's printed on, except to the company who sells it because people think it will work and buy the product. Many of us don't actually take that to mean anything significant in terms of how well the hardware actually works. It merely seems to mean you paid Microsoft for the right to put on that sticker.
And, anecdotally, I've known quite a few people over the years to have huge problems with ATI drivers -- on Windows or any other platform. They may have gotten better, but for some of us, they still have a bad reputation for quality when it comes to their drivers.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
- Co-operate with MS on driver releases (and institute their "minimum-standard" level of QA)
- Pay MS what I'm sure is a large some of money for the privilege
Lack of WHQL doesn't indicate anything about driver quality apart from that certain companies are co-operating with MS to institute a minimum standard; many, many third parties develop drivers over and above this already. That fact that companies do not do WHQL says less about their hackers' development style than it does about their executives attitudes towards unjustifiable costs.All they need to do is open up the specs, and people will do all the work for them
Yes... if ATI opens up their specs, their people will do all the work for nVidia's people. And vice versa.
I, for one, can understand why there's some animosity towards releasing the blueprints of your state-of-the-art 5-hojillion-manhours-in-the-making video card to all the tubes on the internets.
Granted, it's not the same as giving nVidia a briefcase of trade secrets, but you have to be careful when your company's existence depends on that extra frame per second your hardware gets in Doom VII 1/2
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