AMD Dropping R300-R500 Support In Catalyst Driver

[e_tank]

for those worried about not having powerplay anymore, i have a thinkpad t60p with a firegl v5250 and with dynamicclocks on battery life isn't that much worse and idle/normal operating temps are about the same as they were with crapalyst (fan speed might be slightly higher on average but i can't notice a difference in noise). everything but 3d is much faster. windows redraw noticeably faster and normal desktop usage feels much more responsive as a result. great job to all those who have worked and are working on the open source drivers!

[duby229]

your distro is crap and my distro isn't a distro...

my system is a dev platform for Debian6 and not a distro!

and your distro is a dev platform for the next Redhat/CentOS release!

so your distro isn't a distro ! so only you are the crap!

Id just like to take this insane opportunity to say......

WoW!! Man!! Dude!! Yo!! Lock it, rock it, then cock it!!!

[MostAwesomeDude]

If you wish to see change in the drivers, consider contributing. Here's what the current devs are up to:
- agd5f is working for AMD, busy fixing DDX bugs and keeping DDX and DRM sane.
- airlied is working for Red Hat trying to get GEM+KMS in Rawhide to be more stable and rewriting the classic Mesa drivers for r100/r200/r300.
- nha is a full-time student.
- MrCooper is working for TG/Vmware on Gallium interfaces.
- MostAwesomeDude (me) is a full-time student.
- marcheu is working on nouveau.
- darktama is working for Red Hat on nouveau.

I think I got everybody that was involved with the classic Mesa drivers...

~ C.

[smitty3268]

I agree with Wyatt. I originally felt this was a bad move by AMD, but I can understand where they are coming from. If the R600+ support really starts improving I could even say I agree with it, but we'll have to wait and see whether that actually happens or not. Some of the posts showing up here are really getting ridiculous. If you are really that offended by the fact that AMD is forcing you to move to the opensource drivers, then I suggest you simply move to NVidia. Deal with it, and quit talking about suing, as if you had some god given right to have the binary driver instead of the open source ones which have at least a basic level of support. God help the guy who accidentally spills some coffee on you....

What gets me is that every month there are a bunch of posters whining about how horrible the new fglrx drivers are, and how they are going to buy an nvidia card because they can't even use their AMD card anymore. Then when AMD drops support for older cards, we get a bunch of people whining about how they can't live without fglrx and that dropping support is going to make them go to nvidia.

I could swear some of the same posters are responsible for both types of posts.

Bridgman, I don't know if you have any say about this or not, but I do think that if you could support your abandoned drivers the way Nvidia does there would be much less fuss over this. Saying that you are doing the same thing they are is very misleading - 1 year from now it will be almost impossible for an average user to get 9.3 running on their new distro, while the nvidia ones will install just fine. I wouldn't think updates for the new X server and kernel versions would be very labor intensive for AMD to support, but I guess I can't say without seeing the code.

[duby229]

Bridgman, I don't know if you have any say about this or not, but I do think that if you could support your abandoned drivers the way Nvidia does there would be much less fuss over this. Saying that you are doing the same thing they are is very misleading - 1 year from now it will be almost impossible for an average user to get 9.3 running on their new distro, while the nvidia ones will install just fine. I wouldn't think updates for the new X server and kernel versions would be very labor intensive for AMD to support, but I guess I can't say without seeing the code.

That is exactly what the open source drivers resolve... Every single issue you just described is adequately resolved using the open drivers. The open drivers will work with every new kernel, and every new X server on release.. You want to look at the code have at it... This is honestly a hell of a lot better then anything nVidia has ever done. I've been very skeptical of ATi's motives in the past, but if things actually go through the way they look like they are going to, then ATi has finally won me over once and for all.

EDIT: and with the inevitable influx of new users will come new developers as well. For an open source project that is the best possible outcome.

[bridgman]

I agree with Wyatt. Bridgman, I don't know if you have any say about this or not, but I do think that if you could support your abandoned drivers the way Nvidia does there would be much less fuss over this. Saying that you are doing the same thing they are is very misleading - 1 year from now it will be almost impossible for an average user to get 9.3 running on their new distro, while the nvidia ones will install just fine. I wouldn't think updates for the new X server and kernel versions would be very labor intensive for AMD to support, but I guess I can't say without seeing the code.

For what it's worth, we're not claiming that 9.3 will keep working after an update of X or kernel versions, and we are not claiming that we are providing the same BINARY DRIVER legacy support as NVidia. What we are saying is that future distro releases will continue to be supported, but for pre-6xx GPUs that support will be via the open source drivers rather than the binary drivers.

The effort required to support a new X or kernel version really is dependent on both the specific version and the number of distro-specific patches each distro includes in their next release. In theory distros just pick up new kernels and new xorg versions, but a number of distros ship components which don't match up with kernel or x server versions. Fedora is a good example; right now a lot of the code shipping in Fedora is newer than what is available upstream.

The other non-trivial source of work is that kernel symbols and interfaces get marked as "GPL Only" on a regular basis, which means that they remain available to open source drivers but can no longer be used by binary drivers. In some ways these are the most burdensome, because they don't represent a typical API update but rather a *shrinking* of the API, ie often no replacement is provided for what was removed.

[Melf]

The radeon driver turns DRI on by default but radeonhd defaults to turning it off.

If you add :

Option "DRI"

to the Device section of xorg.conf that should give you the same performance in radeonhd.

I have tried it:
radeonhd+Option "DRI" in xorg.conf(device section)
-> cca 300 FPS in glxgears
-> xv working, bit more tearing, cpu usage for the same 720p video cca same as in radeon
radeonhd without Option "DRI" in xorg.conf(device section)
-> cca 260 FPS in glxgears with high CPU usage (software rendering ?)
-> xv not working

BTW, in the radeon driver, if I want to watch video using xv in compiz, I have to add:
Option "EXA"
to the device section in xorg.conf, otherwise the video window is just black

EDIT - agd5f just mentioned in IRC that while radeonhd and radeon both have tear-free Xv code for 6xx/7xx, radeonhd probably doesn't have tear-free for 5xx yet.

Yep, i think there is definitely more tearing in xv than in radeon. Thou, even in the radeon driver there is tearing sometimes when things get ultra hectic

[duby229]

The other non-trivial source of work is that kernel symbols and interfaces get marked as "GPL Only" on a regular basis, which means that they remain available to open source drivers but can no longer be used by binary drivers. In some ways these are the most burdensome, because they don't represent a typical API update but rather a *shrinking* of the API, ie often no replacement is provided for what was removed.

Genius...

We need to figure out an adequate method to accelerate that mechanism...

[Louise]

I think someone should start a donation website, where upset users can put money on AMD and nVidia OSS driver developers to speed up the process

But I doubt that even $10000 would change much. What is a GPU programmer paid a month? $10000?

And AMD's got 3 full time? Wow. My hat off to AMD!

I think AMD and nVidia are doing the right thing. I even impressed that they will continue to support legacy hardware.

And as Open Source? Can we really be this lucky?

[Louise]

I wonder how many downloads nVidia have for their legacy Linux drivers.

And what does that make each download cost?