KDE KWin May Drop Support For AMD Catalyst Drivers

An anonymous reader writes "The KWin window manager maintainer for KDE is looking at removing the legacy OpenGL 1.0 renderer from the KWin code-base due to the costs of supporting legacy hardware. This means dropping support for non-GL2+ graphics cards, which are all over six years old, but in the process would mean that for now there is no longer any support for the AMD Catalyst driver on the KDE desktop. Due to driver bugs, AMD's proprietary Catalyst software only works well with the GL1 renderer even though their latest hardware supports OpenGL 4."

Comments

It's the right move, unfortuntately

[haruchai]

Six years is a long time in the graphics world and AMD / ATI have had plenty of time to fix their broken stuff.

Re:It's the right move, unfortuntately

[Guppy06]

If they don't hurry, all those Linux gamers will switch to nVidia instead!

Oh, wait...

Losing the old PC advantage

[mehrotra.akash]

Wont this result in Linux losing out on the "old PC" use case?
6 year old PC's can still run XP, and once XP support is withdrawn, they will have to either sell off those PC's or move to Linux
By withdrawing support for old PC's, they are losing out on a decent amount of the already tiny marketshare Linux has in the PC market

Re:Losing the old PC advantage

[jadrian]

I don't remember XP having compositing window manager. They'll still be able to use KDE and Kwin, just not OpenGL compositing.

KDE, Gnome

[santax]

I remember when they first started out. Their gui-system would replace windows, but better. With less bloath and more freedom for users. Those days are long gone. I do hope the guys at kde understand that this will mean a new (and probably) big lost of users. AMD should get their drivers straightened out, but I can't help but have the feeling this will bite KDE in the butt and not AMD. Still a shame those gui's became so bloathed and slooowwww. And thank God for fluxbox and the likes.

Re:KDE, Gnome

[jadrian]

Still a shame those gui's became so bloathed and slooowwww. And thank God for fluxbox and the likes.

If this is how you feel, then you'd use Kwin with effects off, and wouldn't care about lack of OpenGL compositing. So I don't see your point.

Teh sky, it's falling!!111

[joib]

To recap, KWin currently supports:

• No compositing
• Compositing using the 2D XRender interface

• Compositing using OpenGL 1.x

• Compositing using OpenGL 2.x
• Compositing using OpenGL ES 2 (code mostly shared with the OpenGL 2.x codepath)

So what is suggested here is to delete support for compositing using OpenGL 1.x.

Personally, I can hardly blame the developer for wanting to prune that list a bit.

And, if you don't want to see this feature deleted, now is your opportunity to step up to the plate and contribute!

So what?

[Tanktalus]

I had more than my share of problems with the Catalyst driver. Switched to the radeonhd driver in its infancy, and got better results, albeit more crashes. It quickly matured. Later I switched to the radeon driver, once it had reasonably mature support for my HD3870 or whatever it is. The performance is great, the stability is great, and I expect that compositing will continue to work.

Basically, AMD has helped the open-source community to develop this driver sufficiently for it to take over as far as I'm concerned.

No good choices here.

[SalsaDoom]

The problem comes in with the fact that the open source drivers don't support everything. I seem to be in a real minority -- I really use Linux for all my desktop stuff, except playing the odd game. All my music, movies, everything I do from my linux laptop generally. The open source drivers won't allow me to do all the stuff that I do -- mainly, I won't be able to watch high def movies -- no hardware decoding support. There probably never will be either, without using catalyst. Do not also forget that since I'm on a laptop, I've got concerns regarding my power usage too on occasion, and the open source drivers consume a lot more juice. So the open source drivers *I would much rather use otherwise* don't support all the features that I use frequently. So this is bad for me, at least. My laptop isn't old, either -- its video card is a Mobility Radeon 5870, still pretty spiffy if you ask me.

Also, the desktop effects do more than just look pretty, a number of handy features for organizing windows and seeing what apps you have running require it.

So yeah, I just can't see this making AMD finally bring their drivers into the last century. Speaking as a Militant Linux Zealot who aggressively hates and seeks the destruction of everyone who doesn't wholly agree with me -- The linux desktop numbers are fairly low, I personally think they are higher than most people think -- but thats still a low number. Then cut that into a third or so which is the KDE desktop people. Thats one third of a small number ... I doubt AMD gives a shit. I see what the developer is saying here, but it seems that his choices are 1) Irritate a lot of users who use AMD graphics, probably lose a number of them who use the catalyst features, 2) Continue to support code for the sake of AMD being kind of a shit company.

I'd rather not get screwed by this, so I hope he continues to support GL1 for now, and maybe we can find another way to push AMD into updating their drivers because I don't think he'll get the response from them that he thinks he will.

Re:No good choices here.

[SalsaDoom]

Actually. Your right. I'm running ArchLinux here..

I removed the catalyst drivers and installed the radeon driver... a few desktop effects don't work (such as wobbly windows) but the important ones that I actually care about work just fine. Video seems to play fine. Interesting! I had to tweak my monitor detection script a bit (xrandr seems to call displays differently according to the driver) but it all works fine. The KMS looks much better with my bootsplash too.

Maybe this doesn't matter? :)