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."

Comments

Nothing for you to see here...

[andrewd18]

Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

Has there ever been anything to see in ATI's Linux drivers?

Re:Nothing for you to see here...

[shaitand]

'Has there ever been anything to see in ATI's Linux drivers?'

Or more to the point, has there ever been anything you could see WITH ATI's Linux drivers?

Re:Nothing for you to see here...

[Calyth]

Yeah, my hair, on the keyboard, freshly torn out of my scalp, whne I was trying to configure their bloody driver.

I use to have a bit of respect when there was open source 3D accelerated drivers for some of the older Radeons, while nVidia had none, but right now, screw that. I just want the thing to work.

ATI Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I must be the only person on Earth who hasn't had much problems with ATI's Linux drivers. Them dropping support for anything older than the 9600 series sucks, but I have been Thrilled with with the Linux performance of my Mobility Radeon x1600. Easily bests my Geforce 6800.

Beryl, XGL, Compiz, UT2003, Enemy Terrority, America's Army, all glass smooth and stable. I can run Beryl while playing high-def (1280p) x264 videos at the same time, too.

Still, better is better, and ATI's drivers do have some problems entering/leaving the console.

Re:ATI Linux

[Nimey]

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.

Re:ATI Linux

[MrCoke]

Try the same thing on a dual-screen setup with Xinerama enabled.

Re:ATI Linux

[stinerman]

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.

Re:ATI Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent here.

Can't say I ever tried Xinerama+beryl, but I have used multiple screen support. I don't use Dual Head often (use Dual Computer with Synergy instead), but when I do, I can drag playing video between the monitors in Linux without a problem.

The real problem with ATI's Linux drivers is that they are rather picky about your xorg.conf. I use Kubuntu, and I had to manually rip my xorg.conf to pieces and back to get it to the state it is in now. I can pastebin it later if anyone wants it. IIRC, I had to manually specify how much VRAM I have before 3d support worked at all. This could be a result of hypermemory, as I have 128meg of dedicated VRAM + 128meg of Hypermemory.

I'm not being a troll. When I bought my Geforce 6800 a couple of months ago, I was impressed at how easy it was to get working. nVidia's drivers are better, that's for sure, but ATI's aren't useless.

I think I'm going to create an account as "kevman" later, if its open.

Re:ATI Linux

[TheThiefMaster]

I had an X1900XTX in my pc, and just installing the drivers didn't even enable hardware opengl acceleration. Instead I had to manually edit xorg.conf to disable some other feature for it to enable. Movies decoded in the wrong colours. I had to manually switch gnome from aiglx to xgl to get beryl to run on it, and it then after a couple of minutes it frequently blacked out new windows (inc. menus) and frequently crashed.

Dunno which ati drivers you were using. Fortunately I was only borrowing the card, and switching to an nV 8800GTS was like a breath of fresh air.

GPL or nothing

[Werrismys]

Even if ATI released 100% working, fast drivers, they would be useless if they weren't OPEN and FREE.

Re:GPL or nothing

[apathy maybe]

What if they were 2 clause BSD licensed? Would that be good enough for you?

Though, I'm sure they would prefer to release it under something more like the GPL so that they can poach any changes back again (just like they are allowed too of course...).

Re:GPL or nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

While I don't agree with the "GPL or nothing" position on the level of principles, I often wonder why hardware vendors keep their source closed. It's not like a driver is of any value without the hardware and quality open source drivers would boost hardware sales. Maybe just a little, but still.
Just publish the source to whatever you have and see what the community makes of it. How could it possibly hurt?

Re:GPL or nothing

[RGRistroph]

Often, not as much is done in the hardware as is advertised. I have been told that examination of some modern graphics drivers reveals them to be very good implementions IN SOFTWARE of graphics libraries. If those companies were to release the source, their competitors drivers would gain in ability, and projects such as OpenGL might suddenly become a lot better.

Essentially, it is partly the case that graphics cards are hardware dongles for graphics libraries (drivers).

I would be nice if ATI released open source drivers, both for Linux and for Windows. However, none of the big graphics card manufacturers are likely to do that unless they believe that their own card can compete on a pure hardware basis alone. The fact that they don't do it, is evidence that these overpriced 3D watt-burning powerhogs aren't really all they are hyped up to be.

Re:GPL or nothing

[Maxo-Texas]

Another faulty mod at slashdot...

Your opinion is that only open free code is of value.

However, in the real world, a lot of things won't get done unless someone is compensated in some way.

Over 45 years, I've seen that most people who declare things should be free do not contribute a bit of their time to help things be free. They want to be compensated for their time but they want to get everything free.

Given a choice between no driver and a closed driver that works and is installed as a binary object, I have to disagree with you.

Since ATI is a hardware company, I think they'd be foolish to ignore a rapidly growing portion of the market to sell their hardware too. However, if that market doesn't buy enough cards to pay the salary ($150k a year with benefits) of the driver developer then ATI is being extremely rational to blow them off. $150k would probably require a minimum of 20k card sales per year on linux boxes.

Re:GPL or nothing

[PalmKiller]

I would use them, as would most any other linux desktop user. Heck I have used the closed source nvidia drivers and it didn't make me ill or nothing (but lsmod did say my kernel was tainted as I recall...oooo I said, tha 'taint good at all...but at least I got good resolution on the desktop).

Re:GPL or nothing

[mark-t]

The problem with giving away driver source code is that it inhibit a company from being able to recover its research and development costs effectively because of the likelihood of somebody else figuring out the hardware interface specs from the driver and reverse engineering a compatible product for a fraction of the cost (because figuring out a way to do something that somebody else has already done is a lot easier than inventing the idea in the first place), and it would price the first company's product out of the market before they've recovered their R&D costs.

Re:GPL or nothing

[Kjella]

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.

This may help a lot

[Bullfish]

If you consider that AMD owns ATI and that AMD needs (considering how they have been hemorrhaging money) Dell to buy their CPUs, Dell just may be able to get what the Linux community has been asking wanted for quite a while.

While Dell doesn't have a lot of fans on Slashdot, they may also be able to get a lot more hardware supported as well.

Strange bedfellows, but...

Re:This may help a lot

[nine-times]

My immediate thought when I read the headline was, "And this is the answer to all those people who asked, 'Why should I care if Dell sells computers with Ubuntu?"

I remember when that story broke, and loads of people were saying, "I use Linux, but I'm not going to buy a Dell," or "Well I don't use Ubuntu, I use [insert distro here], so this doesn't help me!"

Re:Better drivers?

[mabhatter654]

Dell has something the community doesn't have... sales orders for chips!! If Dell wants drivers they stand a good chance in getting them. They just started building AMD systems and bundling ATI chipsets is a key part of the sales pitch. Hopefully several hundred thousand computers will be enough to get the ball rolling!!!

ATI just released new drivers

[jshriverWVU]

here just a couple days ago. Not sure how much better they are, but they are making some efforts.

Oh yeah. Completely.

[Petersko]

"Even if ATI released 100% working, fast drivers, they would be useless if they weren't OPEN and FREE"

Totally. Unless, well... unless you want to some stuff that requires working, fast drivers. In that unlikely circumstance the drivers would be very useful.

When it comes to closed systems like video cards and their drivers, I think only a fool would turn up his nose at a binary simply because it doesn't come with source code. They should, of course, provide it for any GPL'd libraries they use.

Re:Oh yeah. Completely.

[Petersko]

"Nice attempt to dismiss arguments using invective."

Actually I didn't notice I had done so. My apologies.

In my defense it slipped out because "fool" seemed like a description rather than an insult. People who need security above performance can use existing open drivers. Slow, but secure. People who require performance are more likely to be gamers or artists - but probably gamers. For them using a binary from a manufacturer is probably not verboten, or even a bad idea.

And somewhere in the middle is the guy who wants performance, hates binaries, and has to choose between his technology-based morality and his desire to make use of his fancy new hardware.

And dismissing a binary simply because it's a binary, without even considering where the best option lies, seems like a fool to me.

Re:Oh yeah. Completely.

[somersault]

Yeah, nobody should EVER use a binary that they haven't written from scratch themself - they should start off writing up an assembler in binary, then write a decent c compiler in assembly. Then, they should write all their own libraries, and they can start on writing their own OS (or at least thoroughly inspect every single line of source in the OS that they are choosing to compile). In fact, that's not acceptable.. they should really design their own computer first to avoid the security implications of using buggy x86 processors..

While it's obviously not as transparent as open source, you could always disassemble it if you're really bothered? Or you could just say thanks for actually writing this in the first place, and then use it to drive your display. They have no obligation to provide source, especially when they are using 3rd party licensed technologies...

Re:Oh yeah. Completely.

[richlv]

And somewhere in the middle is the guy who wants performance, hates binaries, and has to choose between his technology-based morality and his desire to make use of his fancy new hardware.

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)...

I guess I'm a pragmatist.

[i_love_unix]

If the drivers do what I want them to do (i.e. not suck), I will use them, GPL or no GPL.

Endless hand wringing

[tji]

Why does the never ending cycle of

    ATI Needs to produce better Linux drivers --> ATI announces they really like Linux --> ATI never produces drivers

keep exciting everyone enough to cause this constant hand wringing?

They are not going to ever really support Linux well. If that's not clear after 12 years of the above cycle, then you haven't been paying attention. Move on.. Get a board with an Intel integrated GPU if you want totally open. Get an Nvidia card if you don't care about open, but want working accelerated drivers.

If ATI does somehow produce open specs or drivers, great.. think about buying one then. In the mean time, vote with your dollars, buy something else.

Re:Endless hand wringing

[RAMMS EIN]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't ATI the graphics company that used to provide specs for their cards? Now that is the real way to get your cards supported (much better than providing drivers for a few platforms). While I can't comment on the current ATI driver situation (I've never had problems with ATI cards, but I currently have only Intel and nVidia), the picture of a company that has forever paid lip service to Linux without ever delivering doesn't seem fair to me.

Re:Endless hand wringing

[GeckoX]

Because this time it's a big gorilla throwing their weight around, and thus it just might be enough to persuade ATI to actually produce for once. ATI has always seen Linux support as something that wouldn't make them any money...but DELL certainly DOES make them money.

If anyone can get ATI to pony up working drivers for linux, it's DELL.

However, I'm still waiting for the fat lady to sing on this one ;)

Re:Endless hand wringing

[TopSpin]

They are not going to ever really support Linux well. If you are AMD/ATI and the 800 lb gorilla of PeeCees sends you a memo, you read it and take steps or you answer to The Board because one wrong word from those people and your Ass is Grass. ATI is under new management and now Dell has a Linux agenda. Have a little faith. Things can change. Companies like HP (particularly on the server side,) Oracle and now Dell have been and will continue to end Linux indifference among hardware manufacturers.

It's working. It's not fast and good karma isn't the motivation, but it IS working.

M$ DRM and DX is what is keeping open drivers.....

[Joe The Dragon]

M$ DRM and DX is what is keeping good open drivers away from linux. Intel did open there but there hardware at the time was real bad next to ATI and NVIDIA and they had very little to lose as at the time 3D game play was very slow on Intel GMA video.

follow the leader

[ianare]

I think we will eventually see open drivers from amd/ati, after all Intel has open-sourced theirs, so AMD will want to as well. Anything to get their hardware selling I would think. Especially for the server market, where AMD is doing (relatively) well, and the video hardware isn't bleeding edge (I know there are some open reversed-engineered drivers, but it would be nice to have some official ones).

When it comes down to it, as the underdog, AMD has the most to gain, and the least to lose, by open-sourcing their video drivers. And if/when they do, Nvidia will be under pressure to follow suit.

In any case, I would be happy with better support, open or not. With a growing install base and good, stable, 3D graphics it would also make the game companies not completely ignore Linux. Here's to hoping civilization V is cross-platform! (hey, they already started down that path by using much python for IV)

Holy gramatical error batman!

[CaptainPatent]

Since ATI has been swallowed by AMD, ATI has gone downhil[l]. [With p]aper launches of products and m[i]ssed sh[i]p dates[,] [w]ha[t] makes you thin[k] ATI will make an effort or do the[y] even have the means to do {do - delete} it? I was originally going to make a statement saying that ATI hasn't been too terrible lately, but after all of the corrections I had to make just to comprehend your post, you instead left me wondering if you're missing a finger.

Re:Holy gramatical error batman!

[8-bitDesigner]

Bah, he's probably just on an iPhone!

ATI can't write ANY drivers

[Tihstae]

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.

Useless? stupid zealots

[Man in Spandex]

Even if ATI released 100% working, fast drivers, they would be useless if they weren't OPEN and FREE.

You people are all crazy about GPL/Open Source. "VIVA OPEN SOURCE WE WANT SOURCE CODES!". Seriously, how many *nix users contribute to OSS projects? How many contribute code? I bet a good bunch of people contribute because I've seen projects that have died and have been picked up by other developers to keep some applications alive so I won't deny the existence of contributors.

What I will say is that I would honestly prefer closed source drivers like Nvidia but that work correctly and perform great rather than open source drivers with the current ppl @ ATI. Call me crazy but why does every company that develop on Linux have to give in to this OSS idealogy, the idea of giving to the community in order to keep it alive? Seriously the company that do so are great but the companies that don't want to, it's their choice it's their product and it's their software.

Does ATI need to improve their drivers? Hell yes. Is the solution to open source their drivers? Maybe, maybe not. Get a good team of linux developers to regularly work on them at ATI and if the drivers perform great, you will see many happy ATI users who will not need to buy a Nvidia video card to simply to stay on Linux. Sure there will be a few pissed off GPL/OSS/Linux/Penguin zealots who will cry for the source code, too bad for them I guess.

Re:Useless? stupid zealots

[MrCoke]

A few possible advantages of GPL drivers:

- more stability
- AIX support
- proper Xinerama support
- hardware end-of-life cycle when the user decides it, not when ATI decides it

I'm sure you can find a few on your own.

Re:Better drivers?

[mrjb]

I'm not holding my breath Me neither. I recently switched from ATI (on which I spent several days to get it to work but *still* suboptimal) to NVidia to get accelerated dualscreen and it Just Works. Never looked back. Sorry ATI, you're too late.

Re:It's hard to write drivers for a crap OS.

[Anarke_Incarnate]

So that explains VISTA problems, but we're talking Gnu/Linux here....

Good heavens!

[Petersko]

"And dismissing a binary simply because it's a binary, without even considering where the best option lies, seems like a fool to me."

My english done gone busted itself all up inside.

1650 pro 512mb AGP cheap (no linux)

[Odinson]

I bought a 1650 in early May. 3D has never funtioned in Linux. Just crashes the machine. Many distro, hardware combo's tried. Works fine in Windows. $50 + shipping takes it. $150 retail.

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.

Re:Legal restrictions (esp DRM?)

[ianare]

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).

Linux Driver != Open Source Driver

[keithjr]

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...

Re:Better drivers?

[Gazzonyx]

I'm not holding my breath Me neither. I recently switched from ATI (on which I spent several days to get it to work but *still* suboptimal) to NVidia to get accelerated dualscreen and it Just Works. Never looked back. Sorry ATI, you're too late. Exact same here, I fought with an ATI X1050 PCI-E for 2 days before tossing it on the "I need any part I can find, right now!" shelf, and got a GeForce 8500GT just last week. This is running under Solaris Express Developer Edition.

The NVidia driver update was a single .bin that removed the old drivers, installed the new ones, and setup xorg.conf. It also moved the old xorg.conf to xorg.conf.bak, I was surprised to see that they did the Right Thing throughout the entire install. Fire and forget, reboot and move on to more pressing issues. These drivers were only a few days old, but they don't feel 'beta' at all; they feel very well tested.

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.

The foolishness of binary-only anything

[SgtChaireBourne]

When it comes to closed systems like video cards and their drivers, I think only a fool would turn up his nose at a binary simply because it doesn't come with source code.

Haven't learned our lesson regarding security or portability have we?

Popular binary drivers had some unresolved, severe exploits and couldn't be bothered to address them for about two years. That's just an anecdote, but illustrates that the problem is real and not just theoretical. Anecdotes aside, there are inherent problems with binary-only drivers (or binary-only anything). For the obtuse, the interview with Theo de Raadt interview with Jonathan Gray and Damien Bergamini go into more details.

Production mistakes and design flaws aside, happen. That's why we get the effect that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". But with binary-only that also means that nearly anything, from back doors to monitoring, can be piggybacked into the blob. You'd be hard pressed to find out. And depending on the vendor for the binary also leaves you dependent on their choice of architectures - not yours, and their lifecycle timeline - not yours.

Some, like the GP, may prefer the GPL, others may prefer other open source license. Whatever. Any of them is a far cry better than no source code.

Also, remember the open source is not just a license, but a development model. Popular hardware will gain development speed and quality for the drivers. It's not like the drivers have any inherent value without the hardware. Opening up the drivers would most likely boost the sales of the hardware they use.

Re:ATI Driver performance

[JustNiz]

because ATI management are too stupid to think bigger than cutting quality to save costs.

Re:AMD *will* soon deliver open graphics drivers

[derrida]

As Henri Richard announced (some time ago...).

Good one!

[PingXao]

15 years ago some of us were asking ATI for OS/2 Warp drivers. *rim shot*

It would be poetic justice if ATI put Dell on hold for an hour every time they called to check in on those drivers. Then transferred them to 3 different parties before cutting them off.

In fact, if ATI promises to do that I will forgive them for the OS/2 lies and bogus promises they made.

Re:Better drivers?

[mrchaotica]

The NVidia driver update was a single .bin that removed the old drivers, installed the new ones, and setup xorg.conf. It also moved the old xorg.conf to xorg.conf.bak, I was surprised to see that they did the Right Thing throughout the entire install.

The Nvidia driver might be admirably well-behaved, but don't forget that the real "Right Thing" would be for it to be released under a Free Software license so that it can simply be distributed with X.org to begin with, like the nv driver.

Re:AMD *will* soon deliver open graphics drivers

[Disfnord]

Uh, yeah, no. That blog is bullshit. He said they will work on better Linux support, and they've been saying that for years. He never said anything about open source drivers.

A race?

[sworoc]

Who stands a better chance?

A) Nvidia, with the lead, but still no completely open drivers?

B) Intel, with completely open drivers, but nowhere close to the lead or high end graphics cards?

C) ATI, with moderately capable hardware and struggling drivers? If they open their drivers up completely and Dell turns to them for their supply of graphics cards, could we see a surge in popularity amongst Linux users?

Long-term, either Intel will catch up on the hardware side, or Nvidia and ATI will have to open up their drivers. The first of the latter two to open up their drivers completely will probably get the edge they need in the POSIX user crowd.

I guess we can always hope that AMD wises up and makes this a 3 horse race!

Re:Better drivers?

[piojo]

if someone asks what kind of card to get for their Linux laptop, you just tell them to get something by Ralink. This is off topic, but I feel the need to mention it anyway (could potentially save someone some grief): you still need to check compatibility lists, or buy it and be prepared to return it. I have a ralink card that is supposedly supported by linux, but I could not make it work even with about 3 kernel recompilations and following instructions. I could probably make it work by simply installing a much older kernel/distro, but I'm not willing to do that.