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Dell Asking ATI For Better Linux Drivers
Open Source IT writes "According to a presentation at Ubuntu Live 2007, Dell is working on getting better ATI drivers for Linux for use in its Linux offerings. While it is not known whether the end product will end up as open source, with big businesses like Google and Dell now behind the push for better Linux graphics drivers, hopefully ATI will make the smart business decision and give customers what they want."
How is parent a troll?
I've gotten the ATI drivers to install on my old Athlon XP box (9600XT), and Beryl worked for a while, but then after an update it didn't anymore and it stopped accelerating 3D. Nvidia's drivers Just Work, and so did the Intel 3D accel on my old laptop with 830 chipset.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
ATI is going to write better Linux drivers. How many times have we heard this? What you have to realize is ATI can't write drivers period. Their Windows drivers are the biggest piece of crap on the planet. Yes, they may be better than their Linux drivers but they are still not good. ATI needs people to write drivers for their hardware.
Try the same thing on a dual-screen setup with Xinerama enabled.
I've got an X1600 that performs worse than the 9200 I used to have in here. Whenever I use ZSNES, MPlayer or any other programs that have a lot of motion for X to keep track of, the CPU usage for X goes off the charts. X barely keeps up when I'm watching a DVD! My system is getting old (Athlon XP 2400+, 1GB RAM), but this is ridiculous. I'm looking to buy a 9600XT and sell the piece of junk I have now. At least then I can use the free Xorg drivers rather than the crap ATI puts out.
I've checked with several people who have no clue what the problem is. I'm running Debian testing with fglrx 8.38.6. Yes, DRI is enabled and running. glxgears gives me ~900FPS.
Yea ATI's drivers are great....
BTW I'll give it to any developer making a serious effort to write open source drivers. I'll even pay shipping.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
> I hate to see politics creep into Ubuntu where I have to explicitly enable NVidia drivers, that makes it more trouble for me to use the drivers than it should.
Technically you have to explicitly enable those drivers on Windows too. You just do it with an installer. On ubuntu, it's even easier -- I got a little "restricted hardware" icon, did a couple clicks in the wizard, and I was going. Didn't even have to reboot.
For wi-fi, yes, there are legal restrictions set forth by the FCC which prevent a device from operating at a certain frequency. This is controlled by firmware/drivers, so that the same hardware can be used in different countries with different legal requirements. For music and video, they are not legal restrictions, only the greed of the entertainment industry forcing hardware vendors to lock down their devices to prohibit fair use (under the pretense of combating piracy).
The discussions regarding GPL and open-source drivers are irrelevant to the point Dell (and ATI+Linux users over the years) have been trying to make. There's more to making drivers work in linux than opening up the source code.
The more a piece of software makes use of a certain OS's API and specific device control structure, the harder it is to make it portable. Everything to do with how the software interacts with the operating system, and optimizations made therein, have to be re-written, and linux has a very very different device node structure than windows! There is a great deal of effort required to make the same functionality, and the same performance. Nvidia has historically shown more dilligence on this front. The fact that a so many it-won't-work cases exist for the ATI drivers implies they've cut a lot of corners. Yet they continue to release updates. I wonder how many people at ATI are actively working on this...
ATI has had proprietary linux drivers for quite some time now, and as somebody who's used them for about 4 years, I can say they've come a long was in terms of performance. However, dropping support for fairly recent cards is rather troubling, and nothing Dell can say would make a difference there (no market for cards that aren't being sold). And still no AIGLX. Outside pressure might help with that one...
The NVidia driver update was a single
I've been a long time ATI user except for a single Geforce4 back in my gaming days. So long, and thanks for all the fish, ATI.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Look, there are two types of hardware which I think could easily be released as open-source, for different reasons.
1) Everything in hardware, "stupid" interface with a trivial driver. Basicly any card that does all the interesting bits in hardware. There's essentially nothing to do and could easily be maintained by the OSS community.
2) Everything in software, "stupid" interface which relies almost entirely on the driver, release specs so others can try to emulate what the driver does, e.g. software RAID. Basicly, you have to it all yourself anyway.
Modern graphics card drivers are neither of the two. They're basicly a highly optimized hardware-assisted graphics library where it's of great importance where and how in the different algorithms it's assisted by hardware. Being able to study the interaction between hardware and driver in detail could easily give the competition vital information on how to design their hardware better or where to shave cycles off their software implementations. In a market where performance is vital that could easily lose them many millions in sales.
That is ignoring all the other possible pracical and legal problems which I'm sure someone will repeat to you for the n'th time. In a market with many competitors and stable technology like say RAID cards or gigabit NICs, I could easily see one try it anyway for the chance of a market grab. But ATI and nVidia are tightly locked in a duel and think the drivers are part of their crown jewels. Maybe you're right - or maybe they're right and would shoot themselves in the foot, but I don't see any of them risking it over the small potential upside.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
When it comes to drivers, closed isn't pragmatic. Closed drivers don't get audited. Closed drivers don't work if you upgrade your kernel (or need to run an old one), or want to run on an arch that the vendor didn't bother to compile for. And then worst of all, closed drivers enslave humanity!
hey. sounds like me
but to be more precise, i don't hate binaries, i hate problems that come with closed source software - which is mostly drivers these days.
i am using nvidia driver on my box, but a complete opensource driver would be very nice. actually, i wouldn't have any problems moving to ati (that i dislike and avoid a lot with now) if they released an opensource driver.
problems with proprietary drivers include separate upgrades of kernel/driver (can lead to unusable xorg), no support for older cards (nvidia recently dropped support for one of my oldest cards, but the last working version has buggy headers...), worse quality in some cases (check out supending problems)...
Rich