ATI releases ATI Catalyst 10.1 drivers with Ubuntu 9.10 support (Maximumpc) [LWN.net]

Maximumpc reports that ATI has released new Catalyst 10.1 drivers for their Radeon video cards. "There are a bunch of bug fixes, many of them Windows 7 specific, and all of which you can read in the release notes. But the big news for Linux fans is the introduction of production support for Ubuntu 9.10, otherwise known as Karmic Koala. Available for both x86 and x86_64 distros, the latest Catalyst package resolves a bunch of open-source issues..."

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ATI releases ATI Catalyst 10.1 drivers with Ubuntu 9.10 support (Maximumpc)

Posted Jan 28, 2010 23:42 UTC (Thu) by realnc (guest, #60393) [Link] (1 responses)

The article doesn't mention a very interesting fact:

Although "Ubuntu 9.10 support" is the only thing listed in the "new features" section of the release notes, the package creation for Ubuntu 9.10 is broken:

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21739

Maybe AMD should stop hiring 1st year undergraduate IT students for their Linux Catalyst section.

ATI releases ATI Catalyst 10.1 drivers with Ubuntu 9.10 support (Maximumpc)

Posted Jan 29, 2010 1:42 UTC (Fri) by knuty (guest, #43295) [Link]

Buildig ATI Catalyst 10.1 drivers for Kubuntu 9.10 (i386)? This mini guide fetched at www.phoronix.com[1] worked for me:

chmod +x ./ati-driver-installer-10-1-x86.x86_64.run

./ati-driver-installer-10-1-x86.x86_64.run --extract

cd fglrx-install.xxxx/arch/x86/usr/lib/
(Replace "fglrx-install.xxxx" with the name of the directory that the
installer created on your system)

ln -s libatiuki.so.1.0 libatiuki.so.1

cd ../../../..

sudo ./ati-installer.sh 10.1 --buildandinstallpkg Ubuntu/karmic

Source:
http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21739&...

ATI should either fix their make file or make a short fix in the ati-installer.sh script ...

ATI releases ATI Catalyst 10.1 drivers with Ubuntu 9.10 support (Maximumpc)

Posted Jan 29, 2010 3:30 UTC (Fri) by arctanx (guest, #59239) [Link] (10 responses)

I'm in an interesting situation with my shiny new ATI HD5870. According to the release notes in this catalyst release, Xorg versions up to 7.4 only are supported. This is causing fun and games where 7.5 is being used: <http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=564444>

In the meantime it doesn't seem that there is any support in the open source "radeon" driver for the RV870 yet <http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/ATIRadeon>.

I'm not too versed with the Xorg situation, so my question is: is AMD particularly behind by only supporting up to Xorg 7.4? The Xorg site says that 7.5 is stable and they're working on 7.6. Is this issue biting other people, or am I missing something?

ATI releases ATI Catalyst 10.1 drivers with Ubuntu 9.10 support (Maximumpc)

Posted Jan 29, 2010 3:48 UTC (Fri) by threecheese (guest, #59961) [Link] (4 responses)

Yes, this is biting just about everyone using Fedora 12 w/ a radeon card (F12 ships with xorg 7.5). Because it's been out just three months, I personally give ATI a pass here.
I *was* really hoping for some proprietary 3D love in 10.1, though Fedora's mesa-dri-drivers-experimental package has it working well enough atop my r700/radeon HD4850 (hey, wobbly windows are really important ;)).

FYI This page shows the status of r8xx "evergreen" support:
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/RadeonFeature

ATI releases ATI Catalyst 10.1 drivers with Ubuntu 9.10 support (Maximumpc)

Posted Jan 29, 2010 10:44 UTC (Fri) by higuita (guest, #32245) [Link] (3 responses)

As already was made public, fglrx drive development takes at least one month to develop and then another to test without any change before release. This is a slow method, but is what their internal team is forced to do.

If you do a dmesg with fglrx module loaded, you will see that the module date is one month or more older.

Now if it's a more complex change, might get longer to develop, and then miss the deadline for the release freeze, and will take one more month.

also, i recall then saying that some months are maintenance releases, where nothing is allowed to enter but bug fixes.

Remember, the drive is share with windows, so this develop model isnt that bad for windows, but it sucks in a fast moving linux target. The more people use linux with ati, the more likely both their close and open drive development will get better.

even if you use a old fglrx drive or the open one, or even the distro have one, download the new driver everytime, as it counts as one more linux users

ATI releases ATI Catalyst 10.1 drivers with Ubuntu 9.10 support (Maximumpc)

Posted Jan 29, 2010 14:15 UTC (Fri) by Adi (guest, #52678) [Link] (2 responses)

This only means that they have wrong developing system.

Nvidia doesn't have such problems, also their driver is more stable and
feature-rich.

ATI releases ATI Catalyst 10.1 drivers with Ubuntu 9.10 support (Maximumpc)

Posted Jan 29, 2010 22:37 UTC (Fri) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link]

And guaranteed never to be FOSS. Yea nVidia does a good job on closed source drivers, but some of us feel rewarding the company the supports FOSS drivers is the more ethical choice. Long term ATI will be in a better position than nVidia.

I'd say in three years when all the 3D driver work is done and being shared between Intel and ATI, that's when nVidia is going to be left in the dust. Until all that point it's going to be painful to support the company doing the right thing. There is not much that can be done to speed up the process unless someone throws more money and developers at the problem, which as everyone should know might make it worse. VMWare is building the 3D stack, Intel and Ati are working on the driver interface to that stack and feature completing the 2D driver. Once it's all in place nVidia will be spending 4 times more money on Linux drivers than Intel and ATI and the ATI and Intel driver will be ahead of the nVidia driver in every aspect.

We support and reward ATI now and the process keeps moving, we support nVidia and we validate their closed source model.

ATI releases ATI Catalyst 10.1 drivers with Ubuntu 9.10 support (Maximumpc)

Posted Jan 31, 2010 8:10 UTC (Sun) by AndreE (guest, #60148) [Link]

Well of course they do. Nvidia were providing linux/bsd driver long before ATI ever did. Before AMD took over the state of the driver and the general attitude towards linux was just abysmal. Surely no one expects AMD to just magically be perfect at this.

And you can't argue that it isn't getting better.

ATI releases ATI Catalyst 10.1 drivers with Ubuntu 9.10 support (Maximumpc)

Posted Jan 29, 2010 10:09 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (4 responses)

That page is hardly up to date. It doesn't even *mention* the HD4670 for instance, an r600 card with working 2D, 3D and KMS support. The thing to do here is to hunt for the PCI ID of your card in the xf86-video-ati driver source (git trunk). If *that* isn't there, you know there's no support. If it is, there might be some.

ATI releases ATI Catalyst 10.1 drivers with Ubuntu 9.10 support (Maximumpc)

Posted Jan 29, 2010 10:27 UTC (Fri) by pharm (guest, #22305) [Link] (3 responses)

It's by major chip version, not marketing product identifier :)

The HD4670 is an RV730, which puts it in the R700 column on that wiki page IIRC.

ATI releases ATI Catalyst 10.1 drivers with Ubuntu 9.10 support (Maximumpc)

Posted Jan 29, 2010 14:32 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Ah, OK, so that says nothing about r800 support then. (I know r800 support is landing in the free radeon driver, but I don't know how usable it is yet.)

ATI releases ATI Catalyst 10.1 drivers with Ubuntu 9.10 support (Maximumpc)

Posted Jan 29, 2010 16:32 UTC (Fri) by pharm (guest, #22305) [Link] (1 responses)

All the r800 chips start with a 5 in the marketing numbering scheme.

HD5770, HD5870 etc etc.

ATI releases ATI Catalyst 10.1 drivers with Ubuntu 9.10 support (Maximumpc)

Posted Jan 29, 2010 16:51 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Wikipedia does a good job of keeping track of different ATI generations and
outlining the differences. You should be able to find charts giving
different performance metrics, too.:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R600
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R700
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R800

So HD2xxx + HD3xxx = R600
HD4xxx = R700
HD5xxx = R800 (Evergreen)

ATI releases ATI Catalyst 10.1 drivers with Ubuntu 9.10 support (Maximumpc)

Posted Jan 29, 2010 9:32 UTC (Fri) by sylware (guest, #35259) [Link] (8 responses)

Better for AMD to terminate the closed driver (which is against the Linux GNU GPL, but still tolerated) for Linux and reallocate those resources on the Linux GNU GPL driver.
Additionnally, AMD is doing a very good work at releasing the hardware programming manuals and specs, not fast enough though, but I do understand that has to be blamed on the naugthy patent system.

ATI releases ATI Catalyst 10.1 drivers with Ubuntu 9.10 support (Maximumpc)

Posted Jan 29, 2010 10:27 UTC (Fri) by tcourbon (guest, #60669) [Link] (7 responses)

According to bridgeman from the phoronix forum, most of the code is shared between windows and *nix, so that wouldn't help a lot...

ATI releases ATI Catalyst 10.1 drivers with Ubuntu 9.10 support (Maximumpc)

Posted Jan 29, 2010 16:56 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (6 responses)

About the biggest reason Linux has any support at all from Nvidia or ATI is
because of high-end graphics workstations and such things.

That was why back when ATI started providing proprietary drivers for Linux
it was only for their FireGL line of cards. Only after users started
figuring out to hack the drivers to make them work with the consumer grade
stuff then ATI started supporting gaming cards in Linux.

Pretty much the same for Nvidia, although I think that Nvidia's
driver/hardware architecture made it easier for them.

If it was not for movie studios and other high-end users of workstation
cards then there would be pretty much zero support as far as proprietary
drivers go. There just is not really enough demand otherwise to justify it;
until recently, maybe.

ATI releases ATI Catalyst 10.1 drivers with Ubuntu 9.10 support (Maximumpc)

Posted Jan 30, 2010 11:04 UTC (Sat) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] (5 responses)

Interesting. I guess this is what Andrew Fear (of NVIDIA) meant when he said that there was no demand for free software drivers from their customers.

ATI releases ATI Catalyst 10.1 drivers with Ubuntu 9.10 support (Maximumpc)

Posted Feb 1, 2010 12:29 UTC (Mon) by sylware (guest, #35259) [Link] (4 responses)

From a nvidia coder on phoronix: their professional market is vastly made of GNU/Linux. We are still stuck with those awful driver blobs because there is no real open source alternative in order to be serious in 3D hardware (that's why GNU GPL violation is tolerated...). Once AMD GPUs are *properly* open source supported, I bet many on that market will switch to AMD hardware without looking back.

ATI releases ATI Catalyst 10.1 drivers with Ubuntu 9.10 support (Maximumpc)

Posted Feb 1, 2010 16:35 UTC (Mon) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link] (3 responses)

The ATI GPL driver seems to be pretty damn good these days, at least AFAICT.

I just bought a new computer last week for a mythtv frontend/backend, and the motherboard has
an integrated ATI Radeon HD4200. I was a little bit anxious, having only used nvidia cards before in
recent history. But I decided to give it a go: worst case I have to buy a PCIe nVidia card.

And...it basically Just Worked, with Xv support and OpenGL. I had to upgrade to the Debian "testing"
releases of Xorg (7.3) and the kernel (2.6.32), since the ones in stable are too old to support that
card, but that's not a big deal. I'm quite pleased that it's entirely feasible (and mainly painless!) to
buy a video card and use open-source drivers on linux these days.

So, yes, I'm certainly never planning to buy an nVidia card again.

ATI releases ATI Catalyst 10.1 drivers with Ubuntu 9.10 support (Maximumpc)

Posted Feb 2, 2010 10:29 UTC (Tue) by sylware (guest, #35259) [Link] (2 responses)

This is the spirit.

I'm looking for screaming powerfull open source 3D, and the road is still far head as the current graphic stack is still very heavy and the move to lean one with the requirement of "working all the time" is increasing significantly the refactoring time.
We need more warriors: those who take the main drm/mesa branch (the "programming specs") and push it hard, a bit like the wayland x11 server.
For instance, a kernel abstraction free DRM driver using natively Linux internal APIs with a clean GPL only license? :)

ATI releases ATI Catalyst 10.1 drivers with Ubuntu 9.10 support (Maximumpc)

Posted Feb 2, 2010 10:34 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

"those who take the main drm/mesa branch and push it hard"? If by that you mean "port drivers to gallium", then yes. Otherwise, no. (What does it mean to call a branch of a git tree "programming specs", anyway? Code is code: specs are specs. Sometimes the code *is* the specification, but that is definitely not true here: if anything there are too *many* specs the 3D layer has to conform to, and all at once...)

ATI releases ATI Catalyst 10.1 drivers with Ubuntu 9.10 support (Maximumpc)

Posted Feb 2, 2010 10:45 UTC (Tue) by sylware (guest, #35259) [Link]

Gallium 3D... I must have a look at this API, as I was told "it's lean for GPU".