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Insight Into AMD's Linux Driver Development

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the they-should-all-wear-hats-while-they-code- dept.

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."

8 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. So ? by BESTouff · · Score: 4, Insightful
    When ATI started out producing a FireGL and Radeon Linux driver they for some time were greatly behind NVIDIA's feature-rich driver.

    And they still are.

  2. The best way... by twoboxen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  3. what a joke by radarsat1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    While ATI/AMD is working steadfast in addressing all of these issues and further enhancing their level of Linux support, many of their customers do not realize all of the work that goes into these drivers.


    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.
    1. Re:what a joke by Kadin2048 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      Bingo.

      When hardware companies try to make software, the result is almost inevitably shit. There are some exceptions, but big hardware companies tend to see software development as a 'cost center,' an afterthought to be minimized as much as possible, rather than a critical and major part of their product.

      Look at scanners if you want. I've used some great film scanners in the past; brilliant hardware engineering, but coupled with the absolutely shit software that came in the box with it, it was practically a doorstop. To get anything else done, you had to get VueScan or Silverfast -- addon software written by people for whom software is their primary focus.

      --
      "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
    2. Re:what a joke by jZnat · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's also possible (and likely) that they are violating patents they don't have a license for, so giving the specs out might bring light to this. A stupid legal reason rather than a technical reason...

      --
      'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
  4. Nothing to see here. by BESTouff · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:ATI and Fedora 7 / X.Org 1.3 by drgonzo59 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The difference is that here Vista is to blame, while on Linuzz everyobody magically undarstand that this is a driver's problem.

    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...

  6. Re:rough start by Chandon+Seldon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.