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  • Business decision

    Hello good people of the Phoronix forum.

    I really hope that someone in authority at AMD will read this.

    I sell and service Linux and windows computer for a living. And the fact that the Linux AMD driver is unstable limits my costumer choice. And that prevent me from building a custom linux ring for my client with an AMD Processor and chipset.

    The Following bug are a deal breaker.

    random full system freeze when using compiz and firefox ( X server unresponsive for 1 to 3 second !!!) gnome and Kde4

    X server Crash (KDE4) on log off, reboot, and user switch which force the user to do a hard reboot.

    Overall instability..


    So in conclusion instead of building a basic linux system with a AMD X2 7850 and a 780G motherboard I have to choose a more expensive Intel processor and a weaker but better supported Intel chipset.


    Have a nice day
    Last edited by fred; 20 June 2009, 11:31 AM.

  • #2
    From what I have read, the official line from AMD/ATI is that they make most of their money supporting linux only on workstations and, as a result, aren't that interested in the consumer linux side of things.

    The workstations typically have much slower adoption rates for new features and versions. As far as stability is concerned my only guess is that older kernels and versions of X.org are more stable.

    One would think a simple calculus of whether the {Number of Users} by the {Average Revenue per User Over Time} is greater than the {Cost of Developing the Driver the Community Wants} would suffice, but they must be doing {Profit} less {Cost} is greater than {Some Number with a Lot of Zeros}.

    In time the open driver will mature, and one hopes that AMD will continue to support those efforts as long as they continue to operate. This is their alternative to the "driver the community wants" I mentioned above. It is a risk, but if it is successful it will be more valuable to them and to us.

    The truth is, until the rest of consumer hardware catches up with the processor in terms of documentation it will continue be a mess, on all platforms and for all users.

    It will happen eventually. For now you have your own math to do, which varies by your particular hardware/situation. For some it's whether to use the proprietary or free driver depending on the features and performance they offer right now. For others that math is whether the headaches of waiting for a workable driver for your AMD video is worth more than the cost of a comparable card by another vendor.

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    • #3
      To be precise, I'm saying that our first priority for Linux has always been the workstation market but we are gradually ramping up consumer support as well (starting about 2 years ago internally, and maybe 15-18 months ago in terms of publicly visible change).
      Last edited by bridgman; 20 June 2009, 07:44 PM.
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      • #4
        It's nice to see that AMD is aware of the situation. I DO not blame any employees of AMD for the business decision of management.

        Of course you have also to understand that I have a responsibility to my costumer!

        The decision from AMD to open up to the community is a very nice thought but I need a quality driver in order to offer an AMD Platform to my costumer.

        Thank you for your response.

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        • #5
          BTW the "system freeze" turned out to be an issue in the X server... the fix for an Intel bug :

          https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/254468

          ... turned out to introduce a slowdown on our hardware :

          https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+b...6?comments=all

          If you're using Ubuntu, search the second page for "PPA" and that will point you to a PPA which reverts the Intel fix and removes the delays on our parts. I think this is a fairly generic issue, since apparently the same delay shows up with the open source drivers as well - a totally different, community developed code base.
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          • #6
            Very interesting solution bridgman... But I wonder how I could apply this patch to a Mandriva 2009 , 2009.1 system.

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            • #7
              about half way down the thread there was an actual patch (rather than a PPA with a rebuilt binary) and that patch shouldn't be so specific to Ubuntu. I'm guessing though.. I'm still a bit fuzzy about the upstream status of all this, ie whether the original patch was a Ubuntu-only thing, or whether it was common to all distros using 1.6.
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              • #8
                Guess what, if you rely on free stuff for your business, Do some donation!

                If you can give say like $1000, or even some new video cards to the radeon developers, it would be at least a healthy boost to their productivity / selfesteem whatever, to push the OSS driver to maturity faster.

                It is the attitude that everyone want's to take and not give back that makes OSS world a misery.

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by FunkyRider View Post
                  Guess what, if you rely on free stuff for your business, Do some donation!

                  If you can give say like $1000, or even some new video cards to the radeon developers, it would be at least a healthy boost to their productivity / selfesteem whatever, to push the OSS driver to maturity faster.

                  It is the attitude that everyone want's to take and not give back that makes OSS world a misery.
                  That's actually my plan. Sometime in the hopefully not so distant future I plan to start up a small PC business focusing on offering Linux machines for home use. The plan is to offer a pure OSS desktop (as far as device drivers are concerned). Hopefully it gets profitable enough that I can afford to donate some hardware parts to different projects. That's my dream anyway, and all part of my rock and roll fantasy .

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