Slashdot Mirror
ATI Releases AIGLX Linux Driver
Michael writes "A month after AMD released a Radeon HD 2000 'R600' Linux driver based on their new Linux driver codebase, they have now released another driver that provides AIGLX support used for Compiz and Compiz Fusion. In addition to this long-awaited AIGLX support, this driver also addresses issues with previous Radeon product families, performance improvements, AGP fixes, and added features to their graphical control panel. Phoronix has a review of the 8.42 Linux driver with all of the details about this much-anticipated release."
..will it run on Linux? Seriously...
Mod parent down. He's replying to his own posts trying to look insightful.
Well it will be nice to get my cheap ATI card out of vga mode at 640x480 at 4bit color.... Maybe one day I can move up to 8 bit color.
~Liberalism Is A Mental Disorder~
...at least in my experience.
Problem one: Doesn't actually work with Compiz. While AIGLX works, XComposite does not, and loading Compiz results in massive screen corruption. Joy.
Problem two: Anybody who had XVideo problems before, will probably still have them now. Sad but true. Ditto with font selection and rendering.
Problem three: While X.org server 1.4 is supported, Linux 2.6.23 is not. Anybody running on the bleeding edge is once again locked out.
I'm sure more bugs will show up, but I'm pretty disappointed that they haven't improved the heavily broken XComposite support that they claim "works just fine."
~ C.
This will be god-send for those who are looking to run the shiny cubes and other GUI goodies with Beryl/Compiz.
"The Linux 2.6.23 support isn't found in fglrx 8.42.3 due to issues with x86_64 support. However, we do expect that fglrx 8.43 will contain the Linux 2.6.23 kernel support."
Skilled folks, those ATI engineers..
The site still has not upgraded and shows the same old 8.40.4 driver. There is some official download link? or is TFA talking about some beta version?
I'm having problems with Nvidia and ATI drivers on windows and on GNU/Linux side. With different motherboards and different 3D cards and with different drivers. Many users bashes ATI because they old driver style. My friend dont have any issues with ATI on windows but linux side he has. I didnt have 9700 on Linux side but with windows i did. Now on 8600GT i get so much problems that it's just enought just to mention that i have them. Best drivers what i have seen has come from Intel and #2 position is ATI and last one is Nvidia. These are my experienses what i have collected from my PC's and my friend systems too. Many user just says something "these drivers sucks so bad that..." even without testing them. I even buyed Vista (with OEM version just 20 euros) to know it sucks. I didnt even just dumped when i feeled it was enough, i used it few months to learn what problems normal user might get and how to resolve them. And i did even have big problems even GNU/Linux and previous windows versions i can handle very well. Same thing with 3D drivers, need to know almoust every possible problem and what is good and what is bad to tell just something 'neutral'. We need more open API's and open specs to get things work... it just takes time.
And thank you for saying it.
QT
Can you suspend your laptop using these drivers. There was a problem using the 8.40.3 drivers and any distro that uses the SLUB allocator that causes the system to hang while trying to suspend. Since most distros (if not all) are moving to SLUB this is a pretty big issue, ATI is usually behind the 8-ball though so I'm not getting my hopes up.
Let me know as soon as you find those open source drivers you're lauding over on ATI's site. Neither source nor the binary driver appear to be available from where I'm sitting.
You're reading Slashdot. Of course you like Linux and pc hardware
I've been waiting for updated ATI drivers for non-x86 platforms (e.g. PPC) for a while now due to problems with the open-source existing DRI drivers being pretty crap on my specific card (iMac G3 with Rage 128).
Does anybody know if it's likely that i'll be able to get these working, or is all the GL stuff wrapped up in proprietary x86 only code?
...this is not an open-source driver.
There are three ATI drivers. There is fglrx, which is this driver that was just released. There is radeon, which is the open-source driver that controls Rages, R200s, R300s, and R400s. And there is radeonhd, which controls R500s and R600s.
fglrx has many issues. It now has AIGLX, but it still has broken XComposite. Xvideo doesn't work for many people. Direct 3D rendering is slower than on Windows. The entire driver is closed-source and shims a binary blob into the kernel. But, it still offers 3D for R400, R500, and R600 chipsets.
radeon is the dependable open-source driver for older Radeon-based and Rage-based cards. It works excellently, with direct rendering for all chipsets up to the R200 series. People are working on R300/R400 direct rendering right now; see http://tirdc.livejournal.com/ .
radeonhd is a brand-new open-source driver that controls new R500 and R600 cards. It has no direct rendering yet, but there is a promise from ATI/AMD that documents pertaining to direct rendering will be released sometime soon without NDA. This driver is still being worked on, but it offers satisfactory 2D for many people.
~ C.
Compiz doesn't work. That's what we waited for for over a year?
Can someone tell me what this means for someone with an ATI card? Do we finally get Composite/Hardware rendering together?!
Because I think then many of these issues could get resolved more quickly. By "these issues," I mean things like better Compiz support and more modern kernel support. Fortunately*, I don't even upgrade my kernel more than two or three times a year (unless there's some major feature or fix that I happen to read), so not supporting the latest & greatest kernel isn't a major issue for me.
*I know that this leaves me vulnerable to security exploits, but I'd rather take my chances with that than not being able to use my programs at all because of an incompatibility. Plus, I've gone through upgrading after every kernel revision and it just gets tiring. There are many systems that are up for a longer period of time than whenever each kernel upgrade is released, so I have a feeling I'm not alone here, either.
..until I can get hardware H.264/AVC1 decoding in LinuxMCE using my Radeon HD card then? Months? Years? the day after the next big encoding standard is released?
I only buy pepper spray that's been tested on anti-vivisectionists.
TFA is about the current closed source ATI drivers, (the one downloadable from AMD's website).
The GP was speaking about the opensource drivers, which is a different project. Anyway, AMD/ATI has promised to help them too, and is currently in the process of releasing specs, step by step. Currently they have provided enough information for the mode setting :
- it's now possible to switch to a 2D mode using opensource drivers. Before that, VESA was the only working solution because of important change between the Radeon 2D architecture (up to R4x0 / Radeon X850) and the Avivo 2D architecture (from R5x0 Radeon X1x00 onward).
Other specs will follow step by step. Anyway, you'll still have to wait at least 1 year befor good and stable opensource drivers for Radeon HD 2900 start to popup in your favorite Linux/BSD distro. The good news from today's article is that until then the current closed source drivers are ratter good.
And AMD is promising to keep releasing specs for the opensource drivers project.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Am I the only one who saw the tag "goati", became confused, and read "goatse"?
I own itburns.net. What should I put there?
I have an ATI ES1000 (Dell SC440) that is supposed to have 2D acceleration, including xvideo. The driver reports working xvideo, but actually playing a video (on xine, mplayer, or totem) gives a blue screen where the video should be. (And the same software on older 2D only ATI cards works fine).
The SLUB problem was that laptop would never complete suspend. The manifistation of it was that the half-moon would just keep blinking and never go solid. Now with 8.42 (mind you, hacked for a FireGL PCIID), it completes suspend. Resuming however, has yet to return me a working screen. However, if I kill X with alt-sysrq-k, and I can set capslock and change VTs, indicating it almost works. I'll play with the resume scripts, but it appears that the SLUB-blocking-suspend was addressed, but for some strange reason, it still doesn't resume right.
Ahh... closed source drivers.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
So far, I've gotten it to suspend, and resume successfully in Gutsy, *but* the catch that makes it useless, is I essentially make /etc/acpi/resumed/65-console.sh *not* attempt a single chvt, and so I can never get back to X. So the kernel seems fine, but X won't come back and chvt will hang in the process. Have tried saving vbestate and post_video, and neither, but of those two there is no success. The graphics did work with the vbestate saving and post_video in text consoles though....
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
This driver looks nice with a few improvements over the old one.
However I was hoping to get their 3D API so we could write our own. When's that going to happen?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
ati.com was still linking to the old driver for me, im not sure if it is for everyone else, however, this URL
should let you download the new driver:
https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/ati-driver-installer-8.42.3-x86.x86_64.run
http://interserver.net/
He did not! Mod GP's insightful post up.
agreed, the gutsy restricted driver requires you go back to both sideport and UMA video memory instead of just the sideport/onboard memory. This used to work years ago, then recently started working a few months back but now is broken again. WTF, there are probably atleast a few million 200M laptop/mobo users.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
When they release an Open Source driver for a newer card, let me know. There occasional announcement of vague future plans just don't cut it. In the meantime I'm going to back to sleep.
p.s. Oooh! I just dissed ATI! Expect this post to be modded into oblivion within ten minutes.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
At least the new overlords of ATI (AMD, for those not in the know) are actually making a halfway decent effort to support nix. While granted, they have a LONG way to go to meet even the quality of nVidia's drivers, at least its a step in the right direction, instead of the old "We'll make one, but we're really not going to put any effort into it" attitude. Hey, sometimes we have to be thankful for even small miracles.
Can't find the link to the download in the Phoronix review or anywhere on ATI's web site. Anyone have it ?
GPL drivers are currently standard on most distribution for cards up to R4#0 (Radeon X8#0). If you want bleeding edge you can get them from freedesktop's git repository.
GPL drivers for R500 and up are currently being created. You can get the currently couple of working pieces from its corresponding irregular devel companion.
You either have to wait more time until it's trivially offered as the first choice on the ATI selector (for the binary drivers) out of the box with major distros (for the GPL driver).
Or you have to accept "bleeding edge" mean, understand that all those drivers are fresh from the oven, not thoroughly tested thus maybe not ready for the public at large, and that you need a little bit of google before assembling the necessary pieces, or use specialised resources like the afore mentioned wiki.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Glad to hear linux AGP support is getting attention. The AGP support for Direct 3D in Catalyst 7.8, 7.9, and 7.10 is broke.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I once made the mistake of buying a card that said "RADEON" across the front of the box in big letters, had an ATI logo in the corner... but wouldn't work with the ATI drivers, because being sold by PowerColor, it was "not an ATI card". That's *all* the debug info I got to go with my black screen.
Motherfuckers. I switched to nVidia, whose drivers aren't written by gay homeless people.
where do I get it? The support page still lists 8.40 for my card (X300) and 8.41 for the HD line. Somehow I feel that phoronix is only there to hype "ATI on Linux"(tm). They seem to get the beta drivers and talk about released drivers that aren't available. Didn't Tom's Hardware do something similar but with Intel?
Congratulations, ATI has just wasted another two months, trying to catch up with the competition, and ended up releasing a driver that does not even support AMD's x86_64 architecture.
Obviously the ATI developers are totally incompetent and I can only wonder how long AMD's management is going to tolerate this. At least I have learned my lesson and will make very sure not to buy any hardware from ATI again. Even if this means that I also have to buy a Intel processor.
Tom