Valve Begins Publicly Tracking AMD Catalyst Linux Issues

[dungeon]

I didn't not complain about this, but others... and i see no difference between closed source whatever/whenever/wherever... Some things are closed source for me (the same for any other people) and that is it

[profoundWHALE]

GPU lacks network connectivity and in modern systems if it would try something nasty like DMA to unrequested space, IOMMU would engage and illegal access will be caught.

I believe the security issue has to do with the GPU being connected via PCI-E which you can do almost anything to the computer with, like say, control another PCI-E card.

[_SXX_]

Would be a cool to see Valve pushing AMD to spend more resources towards open source drivers...

[Ericg]

Would be a cool to see Valve pushing AMD to spend more resources towards open source drivers...

Or just hired a couple OSS devs themselves and said "Keep doing what youre doing, 'cept now we sign your paycheck."

[peppercats]

Would be a cool to see Valve pushing AMD to spend more resources towards open source drivers...

I'm not even entirely sure why they're still maintaining their closed source stack on linux so hard when it's obvious the opensource ones will overtake them by next year at this rate...
open source one is already far, far more stable.

[kenjitamura]

I'm not even entirely sure why they're still maintaining their closed source stack on linux so hard when it's obvious the opensource ones will overtake them by next year at this rate...
open source one is already far, far more stable.

I wonder if we could ever hope to see the day open source AMD drivers match the performance of the closed-source Nvidia drivers. That would be a huge accomplishment for open source devs.

[schmidtbag]

I wonder if we could ever hope to see the day open source AMD drivers match the performance of the closed-source Nvidia drivers. That would be a huge accomplishment for open source devs.

Well comparing to nvidia isn't really that simple. It won't be long until the open source drivers catch up with catalyst on linux. When that happens, I'm guessing openGL will be pretty much caught up to where it should be, and hopefully AMD will put catalyst on linux to rest. The next important step would be to optimize the drivers so they can catch up with Windows, and when that day comes the open source drivers will probably end up being good enough to replace catalyst on Windows.


I kind of wish Valve would spend their resources on improving Mesa rather than point out flaws on Catalyst. I'm sure AMD is well aware their linux catalyst drivers aren't that great, they don't care, and they never have. But by pitching in to Mesa, they're helping both AMD and Intel (and nouveau) accelerate their development. If driver devs could focus on improving their hardware while a 3rd party can get openGL standards up to par, we'd get a decent boost in progress.

[Guest]

I'm not even entirely sure why they're still maintaining their closed source stack on linux so hard when it's obvious the opensource ones will overtake them by next year at this rate...
open source one is already far, far more stable.

More stable? You must not have radeonsi hardware then.

Last I checked about 2-3 weeks ago, open-source drivers were incredibly unstable on my 7850. Things like web browsing and even looking at pictures caused GPU restarts, and prior to that, there were even issues with VDPAU playback causing hard locks.

Although if I understand right, this is mainly kernel-related, and affects 3.15 through 3.17rc1 (haven't tried anything higher). Ideally though, I'd prefer not to be stuck on 3.14 to have a 90-ish% stable experience.

fglrx gets a lot of criticism, but for general desktop usage, I found it pretty stable. Even with games it was stable, aside from a few games in Wine in my experience.

I would prefer to use the open-source driver, but I would also like to use my computer comfortably and not be stuck on outdated components if it can be helped.

[johnc]

I kind of wish Valve would spend their resources on improving Mesa rather than point out flaws on Catalyst. I'm sure AMD is well aware their linux catalyst drivers aren't that great, they don't care, and they never have. But by pitching in to Mesa, they're helping both AMD and Intel (and nouveau) accelerate their development. If driver devs could focus on improving their hardware while a 3rd party can get openGL standards up to par, we'd get a decent boost in progress.

They probably don't have the competence on staff to write drivers for somebody else's GPU hardware. It's AMD's responsibility to provide drivers for their hardware and they've never been particularly good at it.

[eydee]

When I read the article I already knew the comment section would be a hatred thread.