A line in the sand for graphics drivers [LWN.net]

A line in the sand for graphics drivers

Posted Jul 7, 2010 10:03 UTC (Wed) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640)
In reply to: A line in the sand for graphics drivers by nix
Parent article: A line in the sand for graphics drivers

> everything that uses the ati driver supports KMS now, modulo bugs

Like the intel driver supports i855? modulo the bugs that made it completely lock up at random moments in recent versions of the driver (2.10 version appears stable, wont try anything newer now that I have a working setup again).

Then again, I have no ATI display adapter use experience. So it just might be the only video driver that never hangs, shows corrupted textures, has problems resuming from suspend, etc when used with too old or new hardware variants...

The too old/too new issue is also with driver versions.

1. Report a bug on driver X.
2. "Thats too old, it might be fixed in the git head"
3. compile, try, hit another issue
4. "you are running it on too old kernel, upgrade to latest kernel from the drm tree"
5. compile, try, hit some other bugs
6. "you are running the developer versions of kernel and graphics driver, of course there are some bugs."

I'm not criticizing the driver developers. There is just too few dedicated and active X driver developers compared to the amount of hardware variants that needs supporting and the complexity of graphics driver development...

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A line in the sand for graphics drivers

Posted Jul 7, 2010 18:03 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Er, that's why I said 'modulo bugs'. Given the immense amount of variation between different ATI video cards it would be astonishing if all of them worked all of the time. Nonetheless, they mostly seem to mostly work (admittedly I don't do any high-end 3D stuff: possibly that is more broken).

A line in the sand for graphics drivers

Posted Jul 8, 2010 16:26 UTC (Thu) by Thalience (subscriber, #4217) [Link]

FWIW, the Intel 8xx chips have hardware issues (related to broken cache-coherency between GPU and CPU [0]). Older versions of the driver never tried to do any memory management, so were not impacted by the hardware problems.

I have an 855-based laptop as well, and the lockups are very frustrating. But it isn't a matter of "driver bugs" so much as "failure to find a good workaround for hardware bugs".

[0] http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26345#c34

A line in the sand for graphics drivers

Posted Jul 12, 2010 19:37 UTC (Mon) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]

>> everything that uses the ati driver supports KMS now, modulo bugs
> Like the intel driver supports i855?

No, no such chip-wide breakage in the ati land. I've r200 working fine, and r100 is reportedly also pretty ok (for the class of hardware it is) under KMS. I've also r700 with the ati driver without a hitch and more stable (that is = stable) than the proprietary driver.

A line in the sand for graphics drivers

Posted Jul 15, 2010 16:00 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Quite. Things that I've never managed to get running before (serious work stuff like Penumbra: Overture) are finally working. When shaders work too I suspect the world will end because there is no further reason for it to exist.