Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)
Fully-functional video drivers -- ones capable of handling 3-D acceleration -- remain one of the weak points of free software. The Free Software Foundation has declared them a high-priority project. Meanwhile, some distributions and even more users have resorted to using the proprietary drivers offered as free downloads by card manufacturers. One of the main projects attempting to provide complete, free drivers is focusing on developing the Avivo driver for the R500 and R600 cards from AMD/ATI, so-called after a specification first introduced in this line of cards. According to Jerome Glisse, who coordinates the development of the driver, progress is being made in the project, and "maybe by the end of this year, we might have some 3-D acceleration.""
Posted Aug 31, 2007 19:36 UTC (Fri)
by hitmark (guest, #34609)
[Link] (13 responses)
then there is the joker, AMD. iirc, there have been statements about doing something with the ATI drivers, but never what exactly will be done.
Posted Aug 31, 2007 20:45 UTC (Fri)
by pheldens (guest, #19366)
[Link] (12 responses)
Posted Aug 31, 2007 21:58 UTC (Fri)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link] (11 responses)
The vast majority of ATI's (and everyone else's) sales are in the OEM channel, and they're doing *very* well there -- wait until the sales figures from the current 'back to school' season come out.
Meanwhile, ATI's older X??0 series of adapters currently provide the fastest and most feature-rich 3D to be had under Linux powered by Free drivers. They're quite easy to obtain on eBay these days too.
That said, I'd love it if ATI/AMD released some specs or at least gave the DRI folks some official help.
Posted Aug 31, 2007 23:50 UTC (Fri)
by man_ls (guest, #15091)
[Link]
Posted Sep 1, 2007 10:23 UTC (Sat)
by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
[Link] (9 responses)
I give it half a year more at best before enterprise buyers notice that in addition to not leading the performance game anymore, AMD servers are bundled with gfx ships which are a PITA to use (in contrast with the built-in Intel FLOSS support) Then the painstakingly acquired AMD positions in the lucrative enterprise market will finish evaporating
A lot of server stuff like Oracle needs X to be setup/managed, and AMD/ATI has long relied on old (but well-supported) RageXL ships on its server lines. However those will have to be cleared eventually. And AMD has nothing to replace them with because of its "no-support" stance (good luck trying to shoehorn drivers in RHEL at the last minute - if they're not in Fedora today they won't hit RHEL for years)
Enterprise users will *not* play the closed driver dance like gamers. They have better things to spend money on
Posted Sep 1, 2007 12:54 UTC (Sat)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (5 responses)
AMD/ATI has long relied on old (but well-supported) RageXL ships on its server lines. However those will have to be cleared eventually. Why ? Are they not enough for Oracle or what ? It's quite cheap to produce new set of chips once you have masks available - and I've not seen ATI's plans to destroy them. Till the Windows Server 2008 (and probably even beyond) RageXL will be enough... Enterprise users will *not* play the closed driver dance like gamers. I know a lot of "enterprise uses" who use ATI's and NVidia's binary drivers on desktop - and RageXL is enough for server for many-many years, so I fail to see where you come from. You are correct when you are saying "enterprise is different": I never seen retail x86 motherboards which are usable without any VGA card (not even RageXL), but I've seen such system used in clusters - not a big incentive for ATI or NVidia to "open up"...
Posted Sep 1, 2007 13:37 UTC (Sat)
by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
[Link] (4 responses)
sure, but they have to play well with new memory formats, new buses, etc Life support can only continue so long, and LongHorn server is going to require new stuff anyway (and even if no one really wants it, enterprises are going to require hardware compatibility before it's even released just in case)
>I know a lot of "enterprise uses" who use ATI's and NVidia's binary drivers on desktop
Only true while there's no performing alternative, and Intel is busy ramping up it's offerings
> I've seen such system used in clusters
clusters are their own market segment, you can't generalize from them
Posted Sep 1, 2007 17:15 UTC (Sat)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link] (3 responses)
>Only true while there's no performing alternative, and Intel is busy ramping up it's offerings
Until Intel starts selling standalone graphics chips (ie non-shared memory) their offerings will never be considered by server manufacturers, simply because of the performance hit due to contention on the memory bus.
Desktop is another matter; but on that front Intel is already is the largest vendor of graphics chipsets, marketshare-wise.
Posted Sep 1, 2007 17:32 UTC (Sat)
by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
[Link] (2 responses)
yes, sure, that's why the speed daemon RageXL is is so popular on servers
Posted Sep 3, 2007 7:23 UTC (Mon)
by ncm (guest, #165)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 3, 2007 7:27 UTC (Mon)
by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
[Link]
Posted Sep 1, 2007 17:30 UTC (Sat)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link] (1 responses)
Um, no. "Enterprise users" will use whatever is necessary for their (often proprietary) apps to run as cheaply as possible for a given performance target.
For "enterprise desktop" users, onboard shared-memory graphics is good enough. How much power do you need for a web browser + email? It's for this reason that Intel is already the largest graphics chipset vendor, simply because it's already built into their core chipsets.
For "enterprise servers", there will be a discrete onboard graphics chip (RageXL is a favorite) to avoid the performance hit of shared-memory. It can be a dumb framebuffer, because graphical performance is completely irrelevant when there's nobody sitting at its console.
"enterprise users" who need 3D performance (eg CAD, Hollywood, etc) will pay lots and lots of $$$ for a fast, certified, hardware+driver combo which is highly proprietary. They're already running non-free software; why would they care about a non-free driver too?
Meanwhile, RageXL will be around as long as server motherboards have old-school PCI.
Posted Sep 1, 2007 20:19 UTC (Sat)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
How much power do you need for a web browser + email? Quite a lot, as it turned out. I don't use 3D in my work at all, yet I've ended up with quite powerful NVidia card (binary driver, of course): simpler offerings just can not handle HP LP3065...
Posted Sep 20, 2007 8:13 UTC (Thu)
by anton (subscriber, #25547)
[Link]
Posted Sep 1, 2007 12:02 UTC (Sat)
by gravious (guest, #7662)
[Link] (6 responses)
Posted Sep 2, 2007 10:55 UTC (Sun)
by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 2, 2007 19:57 UTC (Sun)
by gravious (guest, #7662)
[Link]
Now I know why my Compaq was 100 cheaper than all the rest *sigh*
Next for sure I'm gonna get me some Dell Ubuntu hotness - if they ever get around to discovering that Linux people exist in ES (not just the US, UK, DE, FR). The thought of high-quality open source 3d graphics drivers makes me weep which means I gotta get out more often.
Posted Sep 2, 2007 12:48 UTC (Sun)
by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
[Link] (3 responses)
One of the problems Free Software projects have is that there are often a lot more people who'd "like to help out" than actually bring some significant results. That's not because people are deliberately wasting project time, but often this sort of thing seems like a great idea on a rainy Sunday afternoon, and then by Monday evening after a long day's work you don't really have time for it. The result is obviously frustrating for existing part-time developers who may feel that they wasted /their/ weekend helping someone else who'll decide actually they need to weed the garden or take the kids swimming instead.
So developers tend to be reluctant to respond to vague "I'd like to help" posts unless the project has a built-in "Newbie task" as the Nouveau people do (or did when I last looked) in the form of their automated test software which everyone can run and report the results without needing supervision.
If you are a coder and sincerely want to help, I'd suggest you try (without bothering the list about it) to obtain a recent version of the code, build it and test it on your hardware, then report the results to the list, and if possible identify something you can do that would make this better for the next person and do it.
If you're a non-coder, there's some chance the project is in a phase where you can't help without using up precious developer resources, which unfortunately means that the best you can do is state your support and look for another project that's in a more suitable phase.
Posted Sep 2, 2007 19:51 UTC (Sun)
by gravious (guest, #7662)
[Link] (1 responses)
Thanks for the response. I am 100% sure that I have to get the very latest kernel.org (something I haven't had to do since I switched to Ubuntu - thanks guys!), patch it with the latest DRI stuff and get the very latest X.org and Mesa stuff. They're only the three scariest free software projects but what the hey. The reason I posted to the mailing list is because in order to "un-f*ck" this particular radeon chipset it seems that reverse engineering that fglrx driver from ATI (I mean AMD natch) is the way to go. This I do not know how to do and the instructions given here http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/Radeon200M I think you'll agree are cryptic (I compared them to Albanian in my mail - more a dig at my lack of Albanian than a reflection on Albanian itself you understand). So I was hoping for some pointers. But you're right - git first, prod later - see ya.
Posted Sep 3, 2007 6:27 UTC (Mon)
by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750)
[Link]
http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/Building is quite a good start for interested people, and I updated it some time ago since the instructions didn't work as such with my Ubuntu and it was useful to make some additions. It covers DRM, libdrm and Mesa DRI drivers, additionally one wants to get eg. git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/avivo/xf86-video-avivo for the R500/R600 DDX driver.
Though I think it may very well be one needs to install xorg-xserver from git too, since I've been hearing something about this new PCI infrastructure or something...
Posted Sep 6, 2007 12:48 UTC (Thu)
by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
[Link]
So, don't ask what you can do: play with the code, find some simple feature that doesn't work and try to fix it. You're likely to get a much better response from developers if you can show you're willing to stick some effort in.
that part about changes in mesa and DRI sounds interesting...Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)
Yeah, after their promises, they should cough up specs and source. It sure would boost their lagging sales a bit.Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)
Um, no, it wouldn't affect their sales by anything more than rounding errors.Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)
It might be a little bit more than "rounding errors". Dell considers the availability of free drivers, even for non-free laptops. I don't know if the completeness in terms of features of those drivers is considered though, but Intel has much better free drivers right now.
Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)
> Um, no, it wouldn't affect their sales by anything more than rounding errors.Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)
Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)
> It's quite cheap to produce new set of chips once you have masks availableFree ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)
>>I know a lot of "enterprise uses" who use ATI's and NVidia's binary drivers on desktopFree ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)
> Until Intel starts selling standalone graphics chips (ie non-sharedFree ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)
> memory) their offerings will never be considered by server manufacturers,
The point isn't how fast the graphics chip is; servers won't be doing graphics operations. What counts is whether its load on the memory bus slows down CPU operations. Just refreshing the display does that. A properly configured server would have the display driver stop refreshing the display after a period of mouse/keyboard inactivity. Does anybody do that?Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)
The intel driver has all sort of low-power tricks because it also targets laptop usersFree ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)
>Enterprise users will *not* play the closed driver dance like gamers. They have better things to spend money onFree ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)
Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)
Actually RageXL has been replaced by ES1000 on all servers we have
bought lately (for Intel and for AMD CPUs). The free Radeon driver
works on the ES1000 (which is apparently a Radeon 7000 or somesuch).
We run them in text mode, though.
Server graphics
Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)
"I think it's one of the few places left in open source where there is still plenty of room for new people."
I posted a mail to the dri-devel list a week ago asking if I could help out (I have an ATI radeon xpress 200m) and have been underwhelmed by the response (that is to say zero responses) from the devs. I guess they have better things to be doing than helping newbies learn the ropes. Not trying to be snide or anything, I'm just saying that though there may be plenty of room, signing up may not be a straight-forward or simple matter.
It's also possible that there's _that_ much room for new people :) Seriously, there might not be many people who know much anything about eg. xpress 200m which is known for having many unknown aspects in memory management and no specs at all from AMD/ATI. The few people that know something, may not read everything on the mailing list either, or are doing something else besides DRI at the moment.Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)
Darn it tajyrink - the world revolves around me, did you miss the meeting where I explicitly clarified this point? ;-) Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)
Yes, you're probably right to some extent.Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)
Hi tialaramex,Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)
Not that I'd know much about the projects except as an user, but I think it's usually enough to get the latest DRM kernel drivers and just compile them against the latest kernel, then take the latest X.org DDX driver (assuming one has a recent X.org, which Ubuntu 7.04 does not anymore have) and Mesa (from where the DRI driver comes from).Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)
I had a reasonably good experience with helping with the ATI drivers on my old laptop. As it turned out Google Earth triggered some unbeleivable bugs (drawing over random parts of the screen, clip rectangles broken, etc). I found the code relatively well laid out and was able to get into fixing some simple things.Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)