AMD Publishes Open-Source Radeon HD 8000 Series Driver

An anonymous reader writes "The hardware hasn't been released yet, but AMD has made available early open-source Linux GPU driver patches for supporting the future Radeon HD 8000 series graphics cards. At this time the Radeon HD 8800 'Oland' series is supported with the Mesa, DRM, X.Org, and kernel modifications. From the driver perspective, not many modifications are needed to build upon the Radeon HD 7000 series support."

Comments

Well done AMD

[SplashMyBandit]

This is excellent from AMD to release source in a very timely manner. It shows commercial companies can support Free Software losing the ability to compete (which AMD will have factored in).

They are supporting us so I suggest we support them - vote with your wallets gentlemen! We win because we get drivers that will be supported for a long time, we also win because AMD GPUs generally have the best price-per-perfomance value (even if not always at the insanely expensive peak of absolute performance), and AMD will also win because it gets sales from customers that recognize the mutal win.

Hopefully NVidia will also see this move and get the hint. That would be a further win.

Re:Well done AMD

[chill]

Not gonna happen until the FOSS driver built from sources like these shows itself to be competitive in performance with nVidia's closed Linux drivers on comparable hardware.

Re:Well done AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

No, proprietary and closed source drivers, no thanks.

Re:Well done AMD

[cgt]

So they should have released the driver a decade before they release the hardware?

Re:Well done AMD

[Khyber]

Dunno what you did to your setup, but sitting over here with Ubuntu on a shit HD4200, I don't have any performance issues. Of course, I'm not trying to game or get all the shiny shit, either.

Re:Well done AMD

[cheater512]

Ditto. I've got a HD 5670 and a HD 3300 tied together to power 3 monitors.
No gaming, mild 3d but fglrx handles powering that many pixels with ease and no performance issues at all. No inter-chip issues either.

Re:Well done AMD

[VortexCortex]

Not gonna happen until the FOSS driver built from sources like these shows itself to be competitive in performance with nVidia's closed Linux drivers on comparable hardware.

Please explain how NVIDIA open sourcing it's closed Linux driver would cause it to run worse? Considering that when the driver is compiled by NVIDIA for a generic architecture versus the same sources compiled by the end users, but able to take advantage of architecture specific optimizations would actually make the open source driver faster.

At the end of the day we need all the sources for all our hardware drivers so that when the next version of an operating system comes out we can re-compile the driver for the new OS. This is true on Windows, Linux, Mac, OS/2 Wap, whatever. I don't buy drivers, I buy hardware. As someone who can and sometimes does read and write programs in their native machine code forms, the damn driver software is already "open" to me. It would just make it easier for me to make modifications if I had the original sources. Not having the sources does nothing but make me less likely to purchase the hardware.

Re:Well done AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

NVidia is the worst company regarding linux support. "fuck you NVidia!" is what torvalds said. There is no support for my NVidia graphic card in the 3.8 Kernel. I can just repeat "FUCK YOU NVidia!" you are the worst!

Re:Well done AMD

[glittermage]

My wife won't let me by another video card after I bought three HD 7850s the past 60 days. I'll have to wait until the 4th quarter of 2013 but I will definitely be going with AMD HD 8000 and using Steam on Linux.

Re:Well done AMD

[hairyfeet]

I've been saying this for quite awhile, if the FOSS community would put their money where their mouth is more companies would be willing to support FOSS. And this isn't just some minor offering, not only has AMD been opening the GPUs as fast as they can but they are moving to Coreboot so for the first time you'll be able to have a fully open system from the BIOS on up.

And when you consider that you can get a 6 core AMD kit for just $260 frankly its not a hard choice. Even though I primarily use Windows I think open hardware is important and competition is vital so I've put my money where my mouth is and have been selling nothing but AMD in my shop for the past 5 years and the customers couldn't be happier. I also put my money where my mouth is with regards to my family, we have 5 desktops and 2 laptops, ALL AMD.

So if you support open hardware then frankly the choice is clear, buy or build AMD for your next system. They have plenty of great desktop chips and if you need a laptop I have gotten several Liano quads for customers and they just love the performance, and if you'd like a really cheap HTPC just pair a Bobcat board with OpenELEC which is a really nice XBMC based Linux with the Fusion drivers baked in. Pair it with one of the Bobcat "VCR style" barebones kits and for less than $200 you can have a damned nice HTPC that sucks less than 18w under load and does full 1080P. Truly a kick ass little system and you can't beat the price.

Re:Well done AMD

[L4t3r4lu5]

Not gonna happen until the Linux gaming community support Radeon by buying cards from them, demonstrating that there is a profitable market in writing better open source drivers for their products.

Free market economics. Vote with your wallet.

Re:Well done AMD

[richlv]

foss community does put their money in hardware that works with foss. what's the point in buying hardware that does not work properly ? company would just say "they are buying it anyway, no need to improve".

as for amd/ati, just look at all the problems with brighness control on their chips. it is great that they are improving, but they are still quite a pain.

Re:Well done AMD

[program666]

I might be really wrong but I believe he was really talking about drivers for the hardware that came out a decade earlier too. Maybe I'm reading too much into it huh?

AMD is the company that ignored linux for the most time, I prefer the lesser of two evils, I'll stick with nvidia for a while.

Re:Well done AMD

[hedwards]

If the comments here are any indication, no the FOSS community doesn't put their money where there mouths is until after it's a moot point. Right now your choices are AMD and Intel, but nVidia is getting a lot of support here as well. nVidia has no open option of any sort and I see a lot of people kicking AMD to the curb for nVidia rather than Intel.

Also, even before I opened the page, I knew there was going to be a ton of comments by ungrateful FOSS advocates because it isn't quite what they wanted. I was really, really hoping that I'd be disproven.

Re:Well done AMD

[richlv]

hmm. ati has talked opensource for quite some time. at first the public was excited, but cautious - i guess by now many have been burnt and are suspicious of the results.

what did you expect ? everybody being cheerful, even if it's still not working ?

Re:Well done AMD

[hairyfeet]

Its sad but then the FOSS community will simply get the support they deserve, which is none. AMD spent quite a lot of money opening their drivers, not only did they have to have legal go over every page with a fine tooth comb (Because Intel owns HDCP and would end up blacklisting AMD cards if they ended up giving away a way to crack HDCP) but they even went so far as to hire several devs to work on the open drivers.

Now when AMD does all that and shows ZERO ROI what kind of message is that gonna send to other companies that are sitting on the fence with regards to open or close their drivers? They are gonna say "Well it didn't help AMD, in fact they lost money, so opening our drivers isn't smart" and will just not bother. The community will stay at the mercy of reverse engineering existing hardware or tossing the hardware when the company no longer supports it and they'll have nobody but themselves to blame.

Because at the end of the day, like it or not, it shows that the FOSS community is nothing but hypocrites. They asked the hardware makers to open their specs and drivers, saying "If you'll only open up we'll support you!", AMD did exactly that, and for all their expense and trouble you get page after page of "LOL buy Nvidia" which is the most locked down and ANTI-FOSS company around, or did everyone forget Torvalds flipping the bird at Nvidia?

Re:Well done AMD

[unixisc]

The 'Libre'/FSF crowd should be all excited, since their point is whether it is 'free' or not, not whether it works. From that POV, AMD fits their bill completely. For the Open Source guys, the goal is different, since there, open is about having the best system work. But here too - if AMD has published all the things needed, from specs to the source code, what's there from stopping anyone from taking AMD's supposedly crappy code, and fixing it and then putting it out, and letting everyone - including AMD - benefit from the improvements?

Re:Well done AMD

[richlv]

i do find it a bit silly (assuming you are serious) to label people with a couple of labels and then tell them what to think.
apparently actual users are more... real and different ?

Kudos to AMD for this, but...

[ameline]

How is the stability and performance compared to their drivers on Windows for the same hardware?

Functional parity (GL version and extensions) would also be nice.

Re:Kudos to AMD for this, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

""The hardware hasn't been released yet,"

Re:Kudos to AMD for this, but...

[marcello_dl]

For the same hardware which has not been released, I dunno :)
You should head to phoronix which has comparisons between open and closed drivers.
In my experience, with an obsolete hd2400 that I run with debian wheezy and the experimental fglrx-legacy driver, gamers should opt for the closed source one, while desktop effects, simpler games etc are handled perfectly by the open source drivers. Both closed and open drivers seem not to have problems with kernel updates thanks to dkms, and are stable. Of course free software is easier to deploy-distribute-use in business.

Re:Kudos to AMD for this, but...

[jedidiah]

I don't cry. I just use the other guy's product.

Re:Kudos to AMD for this, but...

[cheater512]

Remember that Valve got various Steam games working significantly faster on Linux than Windows.

gearing up for steam on linux?

[cod3r_]

Maybe they are getting ready for an influx of gamers switching to linux?! That'd be cool

Re:gearing up for steam on linux?

[Synerg1y]

Lines up great with Origin porting over.

Re:gearing up for steam on linux?

[Synerg1y]

Ya, I meant Steam: http://steamforlinux.com/

Here's the latest on origin: http://steamforlinux.com/?q=en/node/47

Still... Pure linux users can now take an arrow to the knee in style.

Re:gearing up for steam on linux?

[Tapewolf]

Are Civ5 and Skyrim running well on Linux? I might make the switch if that's the case.

Skyrim had a few quirks at first, but it worked so well under WINE that I didn't ever bother installing it on Windows. I understand the framerate is a bit lower, though. I have no idea about Civ5.

Re:gearing up for steam on linux?

[jones_supa]

Unfortunately you are out of luck. Native ports do not exist and under Wine those two games have performance issues. Maybe we'll see the next Elder Scrolls or Civilization ported to Linux from the get-go.

Re:gearing up for steam on linux?

[Tapewolf]

Oh, note that this was with an nVidia 550Ti. I can't vouch for it on an AMD card.

Re:gearing up for steam on linux?

[Tubal-Cain]

Performance if iffy for both, though I've never installed either on Windows so I can't say how much of that is my mediocre hardware.

Re:gearing up for steam on linux?

[jakobX]

What influx of gamers switching to linux?

Even if all the games i own would magically work on linux i would still prefer windows. Even something like ubuntu is far from user friendly.

Qualifications?

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time I've bothered to dive into one of these AMD open source driver stories I find qualifications. It's 2D driver code only, or mode setting code only, no MPEG-2/4 AVC acceleration, etc. What are the qualifications this time? Is this the real McCoy, full stack accelerated OpenGL driver with video acceleration and everything?

Didn't think so.

Want good video drivers on Linux? Intel or NVidia. Want good open source video drivers? Intel.

Re:Qualifications?

[Anonymous Coward]

In terms of today's Oland work, there was a simple commit to Mesa to "add support for Oland chips" inside the RadeonSI driver. This ended up being a fairly trivial commit for introducing the Oland GPU chip support, but again the RadeonSI driver is far from being feature-complete.

Another commit added in the new Oland PCI IDs: 0x6600, 0x6601, 0x6602, 0x6603, 0x6606, 0x6607, 0x6610, 0x6611, 0x6613, 0x6620, 0x6621, 0x6623, and 0x6631.

There was also a fairly trivial commit to the xf86-video-ati DDX for introducing Oland GPU support, which again is not really any different compared to the Southern Islands support. Likewise, a commit went into Mesa's DRM library (libdrm) too.

So all the work done was simple commit adding basic support. Nothing spectacular ...

Re:Qualifications?

[rrohbeck]

I'm running radeonsi on a 7850 (since fglrx kept crashing.) It has 3D, is reasonably stable, there is video acceleration but it only seems to use the shaders, not the video hardware. There are a few bugs that sometimes cause artifacts and performance is so-so with some hiccups, but it's usable for real work.

Re:Qualifications?

[cozziewozzie]

Every time I've bothered to dive into one of these AMD open source driver stories I find qualifications. It's 2D driver code only, or mode setting code only, no MPEG-2/4 AVC acceleration, etc. What are the qualifications this time? Is this the real McCoy, full stack accelerated OpenGL driver with video acceleration and everything?

The qualifications are 2D acceleration, OpenGL 3.1, profile-based power management, no video decoding.

For still unreleased hardware, mind you.

Want good video drivers on Linux? Intel or NVidia. Want good open source video drivers? Intel.

Both Intel and AMD support OpenGL 3.1. Neither supports OpenCL. Intel is more optimised, but AMD cards still run circles around them. Intel has fully automatic power management, AMD is profile-based. Intel supports VA-API (big plus).

I don't see a huge difference, really.

Re:Qualifications?

[cozziewozzie]

The 8000 series is a small step from the 7000 series (which was a completely new generation), so the RadeonSI already supports most of them.

Re:Qualifications?

[Bengie]

no MPEG-2/4 AVC acceleration

Of course not, that would be illegal.

Re:Qualifications?

[hairyfeet]

Yes a little explanation is probably in order for those that haven't kept up with GPU arches, which frankly has been pretty interesting as of late. For every card up to and including the HD6xxx the graphics cores were based on VLIW, this gives great performance in games but is very difficult to use efficiently for GP-GPU work like video decoding/transcoding which of course means more power used in those applications.

Starting with the 7xxx series AMD went to a new design called Graphics Core Next or GCN. GCN is based not on VLIW but on Vector units, this allows it to have good gaming performance but gives an additional advantage when it comes to GP-GPU work. If you will scroll down to the bottom of the page I linked to you will see an illustration that sums it up nicely, in their illustration you can see a job that would take 6 cycles due to dependencies in VLIW would only take 4 cycles in GCN thanks to the way it can split up the loads more efficiently.

So while IRL its doubtful you'll get every load to split up that nicely you are still looking at anywhere from 20%-30% less cycles required to do the same amount of useful work, which should be better for both desktop and especially mobile users as it means less power and time required for the same load.

Re:Qualifications?

[hairyfeet]

Sadly its doubtful you will ever see the video decode hardware used in the Radeon free without reverse engineering and its no fault of AMD as they simply don't have the rights to hand that out. You see the video decode hardware is tightly tied in with HDCP which is owned by a subsidiary of Intel.

At the end of the day its just not their to give, since AMD doesn't have access to the smaller processes that Intel does AMD has had to save die space in other ways and one of those ways was tying their video decode to the HDCP decode to save space, if you look up the layouts on any of the APUs where all the components are listed it will illustrate this pretty well, but AMD can't hand out anything that would compromise HDCP without risking getting blacklisted and possibly sued.

Its a shame but blame needs to be directed where it belongs, the media cartels that insist on all this DRM crap being baked in before they will let you play a Blu Ray, which IIRC still isn't even legal to play on Linux so you are paying for hardware you'll never use. Fun huh?

Re:Qualifications?

[rrohbeck]

Agree. I'd looove to find the time to reverse engineer some fglrx code.
I'd hope, though, that with SI they avoided some of the IP shackles of the past. We'll see.

Re:Qualifications?

[hairyfeet]

I just think its asinine that ALL of us must pay for what probably not even 5% of the PC buyers even use. Do YOU have a BD in your PC? Out of all my customers I have exactly ONE, just one, that has a BD in his PC...he uses it for backups.

So I think its just insane that AMD can't hand out something as basic and required as basic video decode for fear of getting in trouble with the media cartels and that they have to bake this DRM in if you are gonna use it or not. Make the media cartels support a simple DRM PCI card or even a USB DRM dongle and sell those with BD players, the rest of us just want to watch our videos with hardware acceleration, thanks.

Blender and cycles

[Anonymous Coward]

With all of the previous versions of the AMD drivers there were some problems with the implementation of the Cycles engine in Blender. The problem was a limited HLSL implementation that made it impossible to compile the necessary thing on the graphics-card. Because of this Cycles has disabled hardware-rendering for AMD graphics cards. Has this been addressed or will it only be possible to use nVidia cards with GPU rendering with the Cycles engine for Blender?

Re:Hey AMD Nice Job

[Joce640k]

All those eyes looking at it will have it fixed up in no time.

Already supporting them

[future assassin]

Built two htpc's in the last month one for work and one for home using A10-5800K and A8-5600K. My WD TV Live is pissing me off (Slow as molasses) so gonna build a simple htpc for my bedroom using an A4-5300K and another file server for the house with the same chip.

Re:Already supporting them

[SplashMyBandit]

Good on ya mate!

Rebadged 7xxx

[PhrostyMcByte]

This might not be as big of a thing as TFS is making it out to be. AMD has yet to give any details on their truly next-gen GPUs. AnandTech reports that all of the currently announced HD 8000 parts are simple rebadges for OEMs.

Re:Rebadged 7xxx

[ifiwereasculptor]

No, OEM Radeon 8xxx are rebadges, retail Radeon 8xxx are new cards. It's pure madness, since it removes meaning from the model number, but that's apparently how it is, at least until now. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Islands_(GPU_family)

TFA talks about Oland, which is the retail 8570/8670.

Re:Rebadged 7xxx

[hairyfeet]

Don't know if they still do it as its been awhile since an OEM Nvidia card landed in my shop but I do know back in the day Nvidia did the same shit with the OEM TNT 2 and MX4000, both of which were packaged to look like the "real" TNT 2 and MX400 but of course ran much worse than those cards. I had a LOT of folks back in the day come to me wanting to know why "That new computer i bought from you won't play the latest games even though I have an MX card!" and it would turn out sure enough that they were duped into getting the MX4000 instead of an MX400.

That said I've come across OEM HD4850s in the shop and they are nice cards, well other than the fact they use single slot cooler but that was the reference design for the 48xx cards so I can't really fault them for that. Honestly rebadge or not if the OEM 8xxx cards run as good as the OEM HD48xx cards ran and I can get 'em cheap like I could the 48xx cards? bring 'em on I say, those cards can still play just about every game out there and I was picking them up for nearly 2 years at less than $50 a pop.

Re:Hey AMD Nice Job

[jones_supa]

Steam arriving on Linux has caused them to make significant improvements to the fglrx drivers. For example in the latest Linux beta driver changelog there's "up to 300% performance improvement in Team Fortress 2".

Re:Hey AMD Nice Job

[jones_supa]

Oh and by the way, if you didn't know, HL1 beta for Linux is out. :)

Re:Hey AMD Nice Job

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that totally happened the last time AMD/ATI put out an open source driver.

What is the best AMD device for Linux?

[steveha]

If I wanted to buy an AMD graphics card, or an integrated "APU" with graphics onboard, which one should I pick for the best Linux experience?

If I want to be able to play Steam games without rebooting, is there any AMD card that would give me a decent experience? Someday I would like to run 100% free software drivers, but in the near term I'd be willing to run fglrx if that is the way to go.

TFA is about bleeding-edge drivers that aren't ready yet. If I buy ancient hardware it will be fully supported, but the hardware will be too slow. Somewhere in the middle there must be a sweet spot.

Re:What is the best AMD device for Linux?

[ak3ldama]

At one point in time, even until recently the 4650(?) card had the most value/performance/usefulness under linux with the open source drivers. I am not sure if this is still the case. Something to see... Any way I have no proof, take it with salt. I have a 4670 and it runs ok for what I have done so far on Linux. It was cheap 3 years ago, should still be cheap. I have never installed the proprietary Linux/ATI driver, nor wanted to.

Re:What is the best AMD device for Linux?

[thue]

This page is your friend: http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature

Don't buy a 7xxx (Southern Islands) or (I assume) a 8xxx (Sea Islands) card, since they don't have open source 3D drivers for Linux; a 6xxx graphics card is the best bet (Northern Islands). For integrated graphics, I suppose the 2012 A series trinity should work, since it is based on the well-supported Northern Islands GPU.

Re:What is the best AMD device for Linux?

[TheCRAIGGERS]

It depends on what games you're talking about.

I've been running Steam in Arch and playing games natively with the OSS video-ati driver just fine. Granted, they're usually 2D or light 3D games; we're not talking Crysis 3 here.

Re:What is the best AMD device for Linux?

[CalcProgrammer1]

I've got a fileserver/TVPC I built with the A8-3870K Llano chip. It's now only like $90 (with $50 mid-range motherboard or $100 top-notch motherboard) and it seems to work very well with the latest fglrx releases. Meanwhile, I have a dual-graphics AMD A10-4600M (Trinity) laptop with discrete RadeonHD 7730M and it runs like crap in comparison. The drivers just aren't there for dual-graphics, but even the on-board chip can't hold its own compared to my Llano. I've got TF2 going at 50-60fps on the Llano with a mild overclock on both the CPU and GPU (3870K has unlocked GPU). I'd definitely go with an APU if you want a cheap system that can hold its own in Linux 3D performance. Incredibly low power as well, have 3 1.5TB's in RAID5 and a 160GB laptop HDD as my OS drive, the Llano chip, and an ASUS high-end motherboard and my UPS shows maybe 60-75 watts during normal/idle operation, it only goes up significantly for gaming and such, great for a server that is on 24/7.

Re:Hey AMD Nice Job

[MCmZC2tptCNY]

This has nothing to do with fglrx.

Re:Is Windows done for?

[Jeng]

Dell and Microsoft have always had a very very close relationship, much closer than Microsoft had with HP or any other company besides Intel, and Intel has always had a very very close relationship with Dell and Microsoft.

Those other companies are looking at non-Microsoft operating systems, but primarily due to the success that Apple has had as well as the specter of 8.

So where is the open Radeon HD 7000 driver?

[Shompol]

I had a misfortune to buy a machine with a Radeon HD 7000 series. The open-source driver is a joke, it fails to play a simple video! (one frame per second is what it does if you try)

Upon installing AMD Catalyst Proprietary Display Driver the video is normal (but the screen is dim. Turns out they have the same problem with Windows 7 driver)

So hold your optimism, if you want a real driver you will need to get a proprietary one.

Re:So where is the open Radeon HD 7000 driver?

[rrohbeck]

The open source driver plays 1080p without hiccups on my 7850. Conversely, fglrx 13.1 kept crashing (KDE on Debian with 4 monitors, 3 of them in portrait.)

AMD

[sturle]

AMD, if you want to rock and win: Get OpenCL support in the free (as in speech) driver. Now. With OpenCL the card can be put to good use. Without it is just another badly supported VGA card.

Re:Hey AMD Nice Job

[0100010001010011]

That is if your card is still supported. I have a not that old motherboard with built in ATI RS880 [Radeon HD 4250] and Debian gave me a wonderful "This card has had support dropped, do you still want to install?"

Meanwhile my nVidia GT210 twice as old is still cranking along just fine with the latest nVidia and VDPAU updates.

Guess who is getting my next bit of money to?

Re:Hey AMD Nice Job

[RoboJ1M]

I did not.
I'm going home now.

Re:Hey AMD Nice Job

[higuita]

a stupid question... is the problem with the fglrx or wine? does the game run well on wine with a nvidia card (on the same distro+cpu). have you tried to contact wine with the problem, if its really just a fglrx, its might be a bug in wine, calling a nvidia only extension.

Also, what is talked here is the open source drivers (radeon), not the close source ones (fglrx), so dont mix the two.

Re:Hey AMD Nice Job

[bmcage]

Is this not why they open source it? So the radeon/ati driver can take over? For me that works great.

Re:Hey AMD Nice Job

[higuita]

The problem here isnt the old card, its the shared memory design of that card.

All graphic cards with shared memory suck and gave problems. they are cheaper, but they are a mess. ATI ones never got any love, even from their engineering, so that shared memory graphic cards are just plain hacks to reduce cost.

ATI shared memory cards always gave several problems in all OS, had a bad performance and had unresolved bugs. No ones want to try to solve the problems of a obsolete and troublesome card. So instead of running buggy accelerated drivers (that can crash your machine), its better to use vesa, unaccelerated but stable drivers. the performance difference between the two isn't that great either.

If you want to use accelerated drivers on share memory graphic cards, try to fix it your self, or finding someone who might want to work on it.

Re:Hey AMD Nice Job

[0100010001010011]

I'm not a software engineer. I don't @#(* care about it being "Open Source". I just want it to work. NVIDIA does. My experience with AMD/ATI is that it does not.

Re:Hey AMD Nice Job

[neokushan]

HD4770 dates back to 2008. It's a 5 year old card. 5 years is an eternity in the IT industry. All the driver updates in the world aren't going to help that.

Re:Hey AMD Nice Job

[HaZardman27]

GGP mentioned fglrx drivers, so I continued that conversation. I'm well aware of the difference.

Re:Hey AMD Nice Job

[Bengie]

GPUs are not the bottleneck for modern games. My 3 y/o GPU sits around 10%-15% load at 1080p with 8xAA and ultra graphics while getting 60 fps and my CPU is mostly idle.

Re:Is Windows done for?

[hairyfeet]

Actually as we've seen here in articles for the past few weeks it looks like they are gonna go Google and NOT Linux, which sadly I can't say as I blame 'em. when Dell had to run their own repo and keep their own fork of Ubuntu just to keep the drivers working when we are talking only a handful of devices? That is pretty sad.

I'll get hate from the zealots for pointing this out but truth is truth, the current Linux driver model is deep fried ass. Quick, what do BSD, Solaris, OSX, iOS, Windows, and even OS/2 have in common that Linux does not? A stable driver ABI. Now are you are seriously sit here and argue that Linus Torvalds is smarter and knows better than ALL those development teams COMBINED? Really?

And please don't waste both yours and my time posting that RELIGIOUS RANT from one of the kernel devs, and yes it IS a religious rant when he actually puts in his rant "And I hope that all non free drivers break often!" that shows he is more of a "true believer" than a developer and obvious cares more about his religious fanaticism than about making sure the users have a working OS.

At the end of the day the ONLY argument I've seen against a stable ABI is "ZOMFG, they might actually...gasp!...make NON FREE drivers ZOMFG!" yet this very article and all the "Just buy Nvidia" postings prove that argument to be stupid and moot because they ALREADY MAKE non free drivers and guess what? Apparently they work better for most than the free drivers, go figure.

If you truly want to compete then you have to make a BETTER PRODUCT than the other guy, simple as that. Windows has a 10 year support cycle so most folks never have to worry about ever upgrading, the hardware will be so damned old by the time Windows hits EOL most users will have moved to newer hardware with a new Windows pre-installed. So to beat that you are gonna have to either 1.- get Torvalds and company to stop crapping out new kernels and slow Linux development to a 6-8 year cycle, this is doubtful, or 2.- Make a stable ABI so no matter how many new kernels and underpinnings come out the drivers "just work" and continue working after the users upgrade.

Never before in history have you had a better opportunity, MSFT has shot themselves in the face with Windows 8 and burnt a LOT of OEMs with licensing costs as well as pissed off their userbase with that damned shitty Metro UI. The field is wide open folks, the finish line is right there, the only question is what are you gonna do about it? Are you gonna make the changes that will give users and OEMs a true "third way" and claim all that share? or are you gonna sit down in the middle of the field to write a bash script while Google comes along and makes a more locked down and privacy invading choice the next big thing? Its all up to you.

http://youtube.com/html5

[raymorris]

You don't have to use Flash with youtube. http://youtube.com/html5