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XBMC Developers Criticize AMD's Linux Driver
An anonymous reader writes "It's not only the NVIDIA Linux driver that has been publicly slammed over lacking support; the AMD Catalyst driver is now facing scrutiny from developers of the XBMC media and entertainment software. The developers aren't happy with AMD due to not properly supporting video acceleration under Linux. The AMD Linux driver is even lacking support for MPEG2 video acceleration and newer levels of H.264. AMD reportedly has the support coded, but they're refusing to turn it on in their public Linux driver."
What leeches? The drivers don't cost the user anything extra (far as I know?). If I've already paid for the hardware, I expect drivers that work and support all the functionality, and there is no valid excuse for any hardware manufacturer to withhold them.
To me, the most interesting part of the summary was:
AMD reportedly has the support coded, but they're refusing to turn it on in their public Linux driver
The relevant point from the article seems to be
Our sources say that these features are implemented in fglrx since a long time, but simply not activated within the driver. Nobody seems to know why.
Forgive me for being skeptical with Phoronix, but does anyone with more direct knowledge of these "sources" want to comment? I'd like to have a better view of the situation than just the words "Our sources."
Just this past week I rebuilt my HTPC going from Boxee (which orphaned its support of Linux) and went to XBMC. I have personal knowledge of the dumb problems with the Catalyst driver.
XBMC is a project whose users take a lot of advantage of old hardware. The other part are dealing with small form factor hardware. A lot of it does happen to be proprietary garbage. In my case I purchased a Dell Zino several years ago for the task. There isn't much choice about for these items, and rolling you own at this size is often clunky (though a lot more feasible now than 3 or so years ago). You're going to find a lot of Nvidia (no fucking way) and AMD.
So you have one group of people that are re purposing and one group with specialty hardware. Not a lot of hardware choice in either, really.
So, yeah, this is a big deal. There is no real reason from my point of view not to provide a good driver for my platform of choice.
Windows users don't pay for their video drivers. Both Windows and Linux users have paid the same amount for the hardware, though. You must be kind of stupid.
Why should they support Linux leeches?
There's a reason why all my Linux boxes except the oldest one have either Nvidia or Intel graphics. In the case of the old one I had to manually patch the ATI driver kludge source because ATI dropped support and a kernel change broke it.
So, not a penny of my IT budget has gone to ATI since 2008 because their drivers aren't very good and they don't support them.
It's a Canadian company :)
Not yet, AMD hasn't opened up the specs of the hardware video decoder for fear of DRM and other problems with it. There is work being done to do the decoding with the shader processor and it sort of works for mpeg2 (at least for me anyway) but not for anything more advanced. For the nvidia open source drivers i believe it's the same situation.
Nobody cares unless somebody drops an F-Bomb and gives the middle finger. Until then we should all just move along.
Well, drivers advertised as available at the time you purchased the hardware should be available and supported well enough. Drivers not advertised, on the other hand... OEMs can't support each and every OS, kernel version, ... especially when the market share is marginal, and revenue almost nil.
I understand that sucks and, frankly, it's the main thing that' keeping me away, again and again, from Linux. But I also understand that companies are not charities and have to make a business case for investing $$$ in dev and support. Especially when, as is probably the case here, there's 3rd party IP in the mix, which would cost a lot to buy out and "open", or replicate w/o getting embroiled in endless lawsuits.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
He was replying to the AC that was apparently saying Linux shouldn't be supported because those users don't pay for software (generally). The AC which you replied to was simply pointing out the original AC's argument was faulty because Windows users don't pay for the software in question either. However, both Windows and Linux users paid the same price for the hardware, the price of which includes support for the drivers. If they offer Linux drivers, then it's only fair to expect the same level of support offered for other platforms.
That's exactly what he is saying. I think you are too hung up on the word free. It's not as if a better paid option is available. All the drivers for each platform are free. As a user who purchased hardware at the full price I fully expect the hardware creator to release fully functional drivers for their device, and to not half ass it. This shock and awe that Linux should be treated differently or somehow less free than the windows version is the ridiculous argument here.
I usually don't pay too close of attention to ATI vs Nvidia war, but I had built out a slick HTPC machine to run xbmc on Linux, and videos had all sorts of problems on the ATI card.. especially with decent quality videos. Hitching, crashing, general instability despite trying different drivers and config combinations.
Threw in a fanless nvidia, VDPAU works fine, totally different experience.
So, I'll stick with Nvidia on Linux for anything more serious than web browsing; their closed source binary driver is a little obnoxious, but at least it works.
What kind of piss-poor cpu can't decode mpeg2 in several times realtime?
The article implies h.264 acceleration for levels less-than-or-equal-to 4.1 works fine as well. Scene rules for x264 releases say respect 4.1, and most hardware players top out at that as well... so who's clamoring for it, and why?
Yeah, only losers have choices.
Yes; seems like I'm a bloody "lucky" winner. I bought a reasonably top end AMD card specifically because they promised open source support. Of course it turns out that only the proprietary driver works properly. Fine "support is coming; they do the right thing and give over the documentation; install it for now and to free later; I don't mind". Except that because it's stupid proprietary code it doesn't get automatically distributed by my distro vendor (today that's Ubuntu; who knows tomorrow). Every time I get an X-org update it breaks.
I really don't care about the high speed graphics most of the time. The free driver will be fine. Just make sure they have the specs so that the colours can be made to come out right on decent monitors and I will buy your stuff. AMD; you almost have our goodwill; You've already made the investment; Just go that last few inches; get it finished and make sure you fully cooperate with the developers. We will pay extra for your stuff. We will be glad to never see NVIDIA again. You will get better integration to Android. This will be worth it.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Not to be too much of a shill, but this is one area Intel seems to always be better. :-) *
Their Gfx performance may not be up to the other two, but their support is better.
Maybe Intel should takeover nVidia
-nB
* when pigs fly I assume
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Fine. Don't support Linux. If you say you support Linux, then REALLY support it. There shouldn't be a middle ground in this issue. It's pretty simple.
I'm currently using a mac mini with the Intel i910 driver and a broadcom crystalhd mini-pci-E card. 1920x1080, both CPUs run at about 30% decoding 1080p. Works very well for me.
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
Intel cooperates with the community. That doesn't mean that their kit is better or that the associated drivers are better. It also doesn't make them a premium option of any kind.
That cooperation also hasn't led to feature or support parity with the Nvidia blob.
Intel is the same sort of force bundled cheap stuff that AMD is.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Something beyond "Cats rule and dogs drool" might actually be useful. A developer might even act on it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Their video acceleration hardware has DRM built into it. The reason they can't release the specs is most likely because their lawyers said not to, for fear of breaking some DRM-related legal contract(s).
The video codecs are the least of my problems with linux support from both NVidia and AMD. Neither of them off any kind of support for switchable graphics under linux. I have laptops with modern graphics cards from each of these guys, and in both cases it has been a long up hill battle getting the graphics cards to work correctly.
If you don't need gaming graphics Intel is the place to be in terms of linux support. I know what my next purchase is going to be. I just wish Intel would expand their market and try to compete on the high end. I would love to see chipzilla enter this fight with thier opensource record.
They tried (larabee IIRC) and failed. Intel == low-end graphics, that is just the way it is.
I wish it were different, but such is the state of affairs. (They are getting better, but really only maintaining the gab, not closing it).
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
This statement gets my complete support. Been using Intel i915 for XBMC for at least 3 years and it's been a rock solid experience. I had some initial trouble when the kernel mode setting was introduced (before you needed an app to write to the video bios so you could get the 1920x1080 resolution) but extremely minor and long past, I have to agree, I'll be looking for Intel net time I put together a HTPC.
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
Would you care to explain how AMD/ATI's revenue is different because I choose to use Linux instead of windows?
I still paid the same amount of money for the card.
Furthermore, we all know for a fact (because it's happened for every other piece of hardware) that if they released the details needed for the Linux community to write it's own drivers, they'd never have to write another one for Linux, ever, AND they would benefit from being able to take the concepts and optimizations created by the Linux community and fold them into their windows drivers.
H.264 patent: The last expiration is US 7826532 on 29 nov 2027
MPEG-2 patent: The last expiration is US 7334248 in 2026 (but if 6181712 is held to be prior art, move that up to 2018)
Otherwise there are per unit royalties without a Microsoft to pre-pay them for you so the OS itself pays no royalties for the driver (or you pay for the driver, or you drive the chip cost up relative to Intel, for whom Microsoft also pays the royalty).
-- Terry
The ridiculous thing is, the video decoding portion of the hardware operates on a video stream which is already decrypted, so in order to use it you must have already cracked any drm scheme, or be viewing drm-free video.
Or you could always decode the stream in software using the CPU... Or even using a different part of the GPU through OpenCL...
There is no sensible reason why opening up the specs of the video decoding would make it any easier to crack a drm scheme.
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distros don't matter if you put the the driver in f'ing kernal where it belongs
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Writing drivers is not free. It costs money to hire and pay a development team.
AMD/nVidia would love it if everyone used one version of Windows (even Windows has driver compatibility problems between versions - Vista/7 drivers don't always work on XP/2K, and never on 95/98/ME, and so on). Not to mention 32-bit/64-bit drivers. They would cut their driver development costs dramatically.
On the other hand, users would love it if they supported every single revision of even the most niche OS, from Mac OS 9 to Minix to freaking CP/M.
Obviously, neither extreme is actually viable. At the very least, they'll need to support four Windows drivers (32/64-bit XP and Vista/7, probably going to become Vista/7 and 8 soon), and OS X, if only because between those two you get > 95% of the desktop market (and Apple's willing to subsidize your dev costs because they need it to sell their hardware).
Linux support is iffy because it's just on the border of "is it worth our money to make drivers for this OS?". It's big enough that you'll get *some* sales, but not enough to justify the kind of development work that goes into the Windows drivers. So it seems most companies are content to half-ass it to hedge their bets - if the Year of Linux on the Desktop finally arrives, they can quickly ramp up development and ship out awesome, Grade-A drivers, but if Linux on the desktop totally dies (at least to the level of *BSD), they didn't waste much money.
That also explains, to an extent, why Intel's Linux drivers rock. Intel graphics are found much more often on servers and ultra-portable laptops than AMD/nVidia's graphics. And, coincidentally, Linux dominates the server market, and is making inroads on netbooks and such. So Intel gets much more out of having good Linux drivers (it also helps that to Intel, GPUs are a product bundled with their actual money-maker, while to nVidia GPUs *are* their money-maker).
Actually, this is why you can't have source code to the binary blobs.
-- Terry
You can't have it both ways...
As a matter of fact you can. If the source is open, then anyone can propose the fix (to either the driver or the kernel) and even do it themselves. If it's proprietary, then you're shit-out-of-luck unless the vendor sees it in their business interest to make the fix and distribute it. That's what this entire thread illustrates: the video drivers and hardware specs are closed, and so all we can do is plead and whine.
So yes, complaining about a problem in Linux is just the first step along the way to getting it addressed (if there's sharp disagreement about how best to do it, then you'll get your 10,000 page thread!). Believe me, if the capabilities of the hardware that you and I purchase weren't treated like state secrets, we wouldn't need to be having this discussion.
A kernel change broke it for a card 4 years old? So the driver worked fine until Linus broke it?
You know, while you have a point, you should take a look at the hardware support list for the nVidia driver, and then compare it to the list for the AMD driver, and it will blow your fucking mind. nVidia manages to maintain support for very old cards, and all in one driver, why can't AMD?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If you ever read the LLVM/Clang Dev Lists you'd know they are releasing the stack for their Linux Community Drivers with OpenCL 1.x full support. They are cleaning up the code and the dump will soon begin.
It's not shilling; I point this out from time to time myself. If you want the best-supported GPU on Linux, it's simple: buy Intel. There's absolutely no room to argue this either; it's a plain fact. With the other two, you get either a proprietary driver that may perform well, but doesn't integrate well with the rest of the distro as you've found out the hard way (breaks every time you apply security updates to X or kernel, doesn't support KMS, etc.), or you get an open-source driver that does integrate nicely and support KMS, but the performance is total crap. With Intel, you get excellent performance (relative to the GPU's potential), and excellent integration, because it's all open-sourced by Intel.
Of course, the downside is that Intel GPUs have terrible performance compared to the other two (because of the hardware itself).
However, there's some possible caveats here: the Intel GPUs are dirt-cheap (integrated into motherboard chipset), they don't use much power (the other two are usually power hogs), and the performance of a mid-range Nvidia GPU running the open-source Nouveau driver is probably equivalent to a recent Intel GPU running its open-source driver (because the Nouveau driver gets such terrible performance), while the Intel will get much better power efficiency getting that lackluster performance. Finally, the Intel GPU is probably perfectly adequate for the needs of most desktop/laptop users who are only doing things like watching videos, and using 3D effects on their desktop environment; obviously, you're not going to have a good experience playing a recent FPS game with an Intel, but if that's not part of your requirements list, then you probably have little reason to bother with Nvidia or AMD.
It's not shilling to point out that a cheap, low-performance option that's extremely well-supported is probably a better choice than a more expensive option that's so poorly supported that you can't realize anything near its performance potential.
I don't think this is quite correct. I used to work at Intel, so maybe things have changed a little since I was there, but as I saw it, the main reasons they entered the 3D market was two-fold: 1) to secure their position in chipsets, and 2) to make money. When I was there (over 6 years ago), they were the world's largest GPU manufacturer. I imagine that hasn't changed. Yes, their GPUs were low-performance compared to the competition, but that wasn't all that important; their goal was to dominate chipsets, and they did then and I believe they still do now (honestly, it seems like very little has changed in the PC world in 6 years; lots has changed in mobile devices (phones, tablets), but not in PCs or laptops). Most PCs don't need high-end GPUs; most PCs are bought from places like Dell, in large quantities, and used in offices for corporate drones to read their Outlook email, write MS Word documents, etc. They only need 3D so they can run the graphical effects in Windows. Many more PCs (probably more laptops these days) are sold to individuals and corporate users, who again use them to read their email, use MS Office, and use a web browser. They only need 3D for graphical effects and to watch videos with GPU rendering. Some might play a low-end game here or there, but most don't. The people who do want to play games probably quickly find out that integrated graphics aren't very good for that, and upgrade to an Nvidia/AMD card, if they didn't do so from the outset.
By having a GPU built-in to their chipsets, they were able to get a lock on much of the chipset market. Instead of a PC buyer need to buy a motherboard w/ chipset, and then a separate graphics card, they could spend a couple bucks more, and get a motherboard with integrated graphics, and forgo the graphics card altogether, saving a bunch of money. Remember, before Intel got into 3D graphics, there were a bunch of chipset makers; these days, many of them seem to have withered away. They couldn't satisfy the low-end users by building an acceptable GPU into their chipsets, so everyone just switched to Intel.
They don't really need to; they've already succeeded at getting a giant majority of the chipset market by having an integrated GPU that sucks, but is good enough for average users who do little besides surf the web and maybe use MS Word.
Saying they need to make a GFX chipset that competes with Nvidia's and AMD's mid-to-high-end offerings is like saying KIA needs to make a car that competes with Ferrari. Not that it wouldn't be nice (since Intel's open-source support is so superior to the other guys'), but it's probably not exactly high on their priority list when they're already making buckets of money by covering the low-end market.
The "protected path" has squat to do with video that has no DRM on it. Either they can release the necessary information or they botched their design very badly.
> ts a mess folks, and the sooner you accept there is a problem the sooner you can start to work to change it.
I just avoid the problem by not buying ATI gear. That's the beauty of a free market. If someone drops the ball, I can choose something else. You don't get away from the problem of shoddy gear just because you're running the monopoly product.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I chose an HTPC with AMD processor and graphics over the one with Intel/nVIDIA, thinking it would have better Linux support, and an nVIDIA based Android tablet thinking it will get good OEM and driver support. Turns out that now I am stuck with both.
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