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What AMD's ATI acquisition means for Linux (and Macs) (Linux-Watch)What AMD's ATI acquisition means for Linux (and Macs) (Linux-Watch)Posted Jul 25, 2006 16:04 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1)In reply to: What AMD's ATI acquisition means for Linux (and Macs) (Linux-Watch) by pbardet Parent article: What AMD's ATI acquisition means for Linux (and Macs) (Linux-Watch) AMD has been quite Linux-friendly with its processors - that's why Linux had great x86-64 support well ahead of those other operating systems. I think they see that this strategy paid off for them. One can really hope that it will carry through to graphics drivers, once the acquisition is complete. Until we actually see something from the company, though, hope is all that it will be.
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What AMD's ATI acquisition means for Linux (and Macs) (Linux-Watch) Posted Jul 25, 2006 16:30 UTC (Tue) by vondo (guest, #256) [Link] Yes, but the market for cutting edge 3D graphics on linux for people who are opposed to binary drivers is small.
The market for high-powered 64-bit processors for workstations and (super)computer clusters is enormous by comparison.
I'm not going to be holding my breath.
Circular reasoning Posted Jul 25, 2006 19:03 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] It is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: one of the reasons why desktop Linux has not caught on is graphic cards, and therefore graphic card makers do not see much need for open drivers. It is, in fact, not very different from what happened to 64 bits -- Intel did not see any possibilities in it beyond Itanium, and Itanium was a big flop. So there was little market for 64-bit processors until AMD started selling them. Then it exploded and Intel had to jump aboard, but meanwhile AMD has had a jumpstart of some months.Similarly, opening the graphics drivers could mean paving the way for desktop Linux, which in turn would put ATI (and AMD) ahead of the game with their libre, supported, high-performance drivers. Now imagine if Linux became a gamer's dream operating system.
Circular reasoning Posted Jul 25, 2006 20:02 UTC (Tue) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] imagine if Linux became a gamer's dream operating system.I think it's not just good 3D which is needed - gamers expect that they buy the DVD, put it into the Windows computer or a console and it "just works". I'm not sure that it's possible to the same in the Linux world - will the same binary work well on the last few versions of SuSE, Fedora and Ubuntu? Not to mention that the support of a desktop Linux system tends be lower than the windows systems: I mean WinXP was released 5 years ago and I can run the latest games on it - could you run a current binary program on a 5 years old Linux distribution (e.g. Debian potato)?
Circular reasoning Posted Jul 26, 2006 2:58 UTC (Wed) by xanni (subscriber, #361) [Link] Why would you want your game to run on multiple Linux distros? Surely it's easier to make a "Live-CD" with whatever kernel and libraries the game needs on it and run the game as process 1.
Circular reasoning Posted Jul 26, 2006 5:31 UTC (Wed) by beoba (guest, #16942) [Link] What happens when the game gets patched?
Circular reasoning Posted Jul 26, 2006 5:32 UTC (Wed) by beoba (guest, #16942) [Link] Woops, forgot to mention this too:
Say you have a computer which uses the successor to PCIe, and your game CD has a kernel that does not have support for this successor.
Saved games Posted Jul 26, 2006 8:44 UTC (Wed) by dark (subscriber, #8483) [Link] I've been thinking along these lines, but it leaves the problem of where to store saved games. The best I can think of is to take a leaf from Sony and require people to buy a USB stick for the purpose.
Then there's the speed issue: one reason many games install to disk is to speed up access to the game files.
If a live-CD tried to copy its files to disk it has a significant risk of breaking the installed system.
Circular reasoning Posted Jul 26, 2006 5:53 UTC (Wed) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link] Seems to have worked well enough with the games from Loki...
Circular reasoning Posted Jul 26, 2006 9:24 UTC (Wed) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] I'm not that sure, Loki went backrupt, didn't it?
Circular reasoning Posted Jul 26, 2006 10:41 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] "worked out well for games from loki" != "worked out well for loki"
Shit happens.
Circular reasoning Posted Jul 26, 2006 15:28 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] I don't think gamers would have much problem in updating their operating system every few years. Heavy Windows users are used to reinstall the OS every few weeks anyway, otherwise performance suffers.As to binaries, it can be done -- the first example that comes to mind is the Java VM -- but I'm not sure that binaries are the best way to deliver games anyway. A different model could be explored maybe: distribute the engine as libre software, for free; charge for the levels with a different license. In the same vein as what Id did with the original Doom (a demo version for free, a pay version with full access to the levels), but a step further.
What AMD's ATI acquisition means for Linux (and Macs) (Linux-Watch) Posted Jul 25, 2006 23:39 UTC (Tue) by jeroen (subscriber, #12372) [Link] The market for not so cutting edge Linux machines where you simply don't have all the trouble you get with proprietary drivers seems to be bigger. And at the moment, it's mostly the intel graphics chips which serve this market. And those chips come only with an intel CPU. So if AMD+ATI wants to compete in that market, they have to release specifications just like Intel is doing. Not only will they lose market share in the graphic chip market (even if it's only a tiny part at the moment, it might grow bigger in the next few years), but also in the CPU market.
What AMD's ATI acquisition means for Linux (and Macs) (Linux-Watch) Posted Jul 26, 2006 0:12 UTC (Wed) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link] I think you're neglecting the influence of the resellers - a lot of those compute clusters need visualisation machines with decent 3D, and the same companies (HP, IBM, SGI et al) sell both systems together.A large part of their proposition is support, and they can support neither the hardware nor the OS if it requires closed drivers. Buy a graphics workstation with (say) RHEL and you can have your graphics or your enterprise support. At the moment there's little choice, but with ATI and AMD one and the same these companies can use their processor spending as leverage to get open drivers to end the support problems.
Proving a negative Posted Jul 27, 2006 13:23 UTC (Thu) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link] Yes, but the market for cutting edge 3D graphics on linux for people who are opposed to binary drivers is small. That's a rather definate statement of a negative and I'm wondering how you've come to that conclusion. As one simple example, two unrelated groups I know of looked at using small PCs with high end graphics cards to implement a video wall of large size and high resolution (think of the walls you see in James Bond movies) to be driven from a supercomputer. About 1,000 cards in each proposal. Both proposals foundered because they needed small changes to the graphics drivers. Proceeding with closed source drivers and hoping for the best was too high a risk for the project sponsors.
AMD, LinuxBIOS, and X.org Posted Jul 25, 2006 16:41 UTC (Tue) by brugolsky (subscriber, #28) [Link] AMD's open specs have been a great boon to LinuxBIOS; nearly all recent AMD-based motherboards are working or nearly working. Intel is always a mixed bag: they've released plenty of documentation for their NICs, ICH* SATA controllers, graphics chips, etc. But lots of simple northbridge/southbridge documentation is not freely available. And then there's the dreaded SMM gunk.
Currently, we've got this strange quandary where AMD-based systems have the best-documented innards on the parts that they own, but most PCIe motherboards have Nvidia motherboard chipsets; meanwhile Intel is producing the best-documented 3D graphics chips. :-(
If some of the ATI motherboard and graphics chipset documentation can be pried open, we can have very high-performance hardware running an entirely free software stack from initial power on.
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