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The Letter That Started AMD's Open-Source Strategy
An anonymous reader writes "In marking the fourth anniversary of AMD's open-source strategy for their Radeon graphics, Phoronix has published the letter that launched this open-source effort. It was a letter written by Novell SUSE X engineers and submitted to AMD management with their open-source proposal."
Even their closed-source driver sucks, it's not just the open source one.
The OSS driver works pretty good for antique hardware. Unfortunately, it doesn't work very well for anything vaguely modern, while fglrx pretty much doesn't support anything more than a few years old (and it does more or less suck.) Consequently, if you have anything but the fanciest (unless it's very very new) or shabbiest ATI card, you can expect it to suck rocks through straws on Linux. nVidia is better but shares many of the same flaws. However, middle-aged hardware is well-supported by the official driver, and amazingly old hardware is supported as well. That makes support much easier, and while shopping for older computers with Linux compatibility in mind, it makes avoiding ATI a no-brainer as well. This reduction in resale value causes me to value ATI less up front... But to the masses who will never run Linux on a desktop, it's fairly irrelevant. Most people don't buy used hardware.
Anyone want to buy a P4 desktop with an ATI Rage Pro in it? It runs Ubuntu just fine :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Starts on Page 2.
The difference there is that Intel doesn't have any IP in this area worth protecting.
Also, what you're conveniently ignoring is that most of the source that AMD has came from ATI and was prior to the change in strategy. It's not easy to go back and retroactively open source things for which you may or may not already have the rights. I'm guessing that there's probably a fair amount of other people's IP involved. And even if there isn't, the legal team does still need to go through and make sure that they aren't going to be sued for releaseing something they shouldn't.
To ensure an open development process NOVELL would require that it will not make use of any specifications or programming documentation that can not be made available to other developers from the open source community also under a suitable documentation publication program which will permit the release of source code under an open source license.
This step will help to ensure continued maintenance for hardware components beyond the maintenance cycle of the manufacturer and will help customer to secure their investment. Furthermore it will demonstrate and underline AMD's full commitment to the open source development model and send a positive signal to the open source community which this has been waiting for for a long time.
NOVELL will ensure that a driver with at least base functionalities is available for earlier releases of the X Window System at least back to X11 R6.9 to be integrated in existing enterprise products by their respective vendors.
Exactly
Stallmantitis is ridiculous.
YOUR COMPUTER requires a non-trivial amount of closed-source information. It doesn't matter if it's in hardware or software.
And of course the 1st post is a troll, it's anonymous.
how long until
Well now it doesn't _require_ firmware to be closed-source. And my understanding was that typically, devices that absolutely require firmware to even work at all, well those would be the cheap corner-cutters a-la WinModem - an unfortunate plague in the hardware industry. Really, if that's where we are, then motherboards might as well just give us a thousand socketed general-purpose output pins, and we'll push on whatever connectors we want and turn the whole thing into a glorified FPGA emulator.
There's always this pendulum swing - shitty mfgs push more functionality into SW/FW, things get too slow, so along comes a bright-eyed new guy with real hardware again, that runs nice and fast. Then the new guy falls in love with money, starts peddling garbage again, and the cycle repeats.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Yes. Firmware is just an enabler that lets your hardware expose the features you read on the hardware's box before buying it. It's not related to the specific uses you want to make of your hardware, it's software-independent, so you as an end user have no interest in tinkering with firmware (although being able to do so can be an extra bonus, in some specific scenarios).
Drivers, on the other hand, bind your hardware to a specific operational environment, and limit your freedom to use the hardware in any way you want. They limit the CPU architectures you can run your hardware on. They limit the choice of operating systems you can run your hardware with. They limit the adaptability of your hardware to new operating system releases. An open source driver that, even by interfacing to closed-source firmware, sets me free from all of these limits, is perfectly free to me.
DON'T BUY FROM ATI enemy of your freedom
That picture is looking sillier and sillier as time goes on.
YOUR COMPUTER requires a non-trivial amount of closed-source information. It doesn't matter if it's in hardware or software.
It matters from a practical perspective. If there is a bug in open software, then you can fix it. If some driver threatens the stability of your system, then you can do something about it. You can't really do that if you find a hardware bug, though you might be able to work around it in software. If the open software suffers bitrot then you can update it to the latest APIs. You can't really do that with closed software. Open source software gives a skilled programmer the ability to fix pretty much any problem on their system in a way that just isn't possible with closed source.
Most do, but a few run Coreboot.
ATI has great quality hardware, but lower quality drivers/software. Nvidia it is the opposite.
I switched from Nvidia to ATI for this reason. My ATI 5750 does run Beryl suprising well. I game only on Windows 7 and I doubt performance would be good in Linux, but that can change. If ATI could get good quality drivers for Linux we would be happy to support them. The specs and code open are cryptic and only cover what appears to be a dispatcher which then transmit the code to the different parts of the GPU according to other posters here.
It is not like we are going to compete agaisnt ATI with trade secrets unless one of us has a 1 billion dollar chip fab plant.
Intel opened their speced and it helped them tremendously. Now since ATI has great integration with their bulldozer and Llamo chips new innovations would help sales. We could even improve the drivers to the point where some of the code can be contributed back to their team who develops drivers for Windows.
I have noticed that World of Warcraft runs slower in DirectX 11 vs DirectX 9 which is odd and points to the drivers needing work as Nvidia users get a 20% performance increase. Opening will help.
http://saveie6.com/
Question: Have you tried SIW to find out what the exact chips you are running that are having Win 7 driver problems, and then replacing them with an updated driver from another model with the same chip?
Yep. I searched long and hard to find a driver that would work, and finally did. On the second resume from suspend, I get a free reboot. There is no improved power saving driver, either.
You just have to remember that with Windows there is ALWAYS more than one way to skin a cat.
The cat is a lie.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"