AMD/ATI lost another Linux customer

[aidanjt]

First of all, I'd like to applaud AMD for the fantastic work they've done with the radeon drivers, and you personally, bridgman, for the work and community relations you've maintained. It's quite frankly, brilliant. That said:

Our largest Linux market is still the professional workstation market, which is almost entirely based on enterprise distros and relatively stable hardware platforms. That's where fglrx comes from, and where it continues to be essential. As long as we are making a proprietary driver, we are also trying to use it as a vehicle to deliver neat new features to consumer users, such as MultiView and Crossfire.

I simply cannot agree with this assertion, you have absolutely no reliable metric for measuring the volume of desktop radeon usage. Furthermore, even if this were true, it is in AMD's best interests to have an fglrx which supports the latest X.org and Linux kernel releases, so when a workstation customer buys a FireGL card, the drivers will already be stable and well tested on whatever 'Enterprise' distro they go with. Not that all workstation customers *will* use an 'Enterprise' distro either. And I'm sure they wont be amused when their $2,000 paperweight wont work on their machine. I'm sure you can agree that kind of situation is not in AMD's best interests since it gives away custom to nVidia.

[mtippett]

I simply cannot agree with this assertion, you have absolutely no reliable metric for measuring the volume of desktop radeon usage. Furthermore, even if this were true, it is in AMD's best interests to have an fglrx which supports the latest X.org and Linux kernel releases, so when a workstation customer buys a FireGL card, the drivers will already be stable and well tested on whatever 'Enterprise' distro they go with. Not that all workstation customers *will* use an 'Enterprise' distro either. And I'm sure they wont be amused when their $2,000 paperweight wont work on their machine. I'm sure you can agree that kind of situation is not in AMD's best interests since it gives away custom to nVidia.

We do have a reliable metric for enterprise sales. We sell to OEMs who sell to Workstation customers. There is also marketing research in the Workstation market that indicates which market segments have what OS mix.

Unfortunately, for the consumer side, we have haphazard OEM engagement and no quanitifiable data for how may home of office PCs are running Linux.

Our distro mix is based on direct market information from OEMs and direct WS customers. Yes, there are a percentage of users who don't fit that market profile.

As has been said a few times before, the 2.6.29, 2.6.30 and 2.6.31 kernel bumps have been painful due to some of the upstream changes. Likewise some of the XOrg changes previously were painful too. We ultimately had to make the choice to bloat the installer with a new X driver module, rather than investing further time to combine some of the modules.

Regards,

Matthew

[aidanjt]

As has been said a few times before, the 2.6.29, 2.6.30 and 2.6.31 kernel bumps have been painful due to some of the upstream changes. Likewise some of the XOrg changes previously were painful too. We ultimately had to make the choice to bloat the installer with a new X driver module, rather than investing further time to combine some of the modules.

Agreed, the last year has been pretty rough with the major re-factoring of the F/OSS graphics stack. But I brought this up just because I wanted certain people to stop and think before making claims like "WS users are our primary customers". Aside from being a strawman argument, it's non-verifiable in factual accuracy.

[mtippett]

Agreed, the last year has been pretty rough with the major re-factoring of the F/OSS graphics stack. But I brought this up just because I wanted certain people to stop and think before making claims like "WS users are our primary customers". Aside from being a strawman argument, it's non-verifiable in factual accuracy.

Okay.

Workstation is one of the few quantifiable revenue streams. We *can* say this money coming into the company is tainted with Linux. We can't say that about consumer.　　Other vendors have other reasons for being in Linux. Of course over time the reasons may dilute and triggers may change, but John Bridgman is correct in that we historically have been involved in Linux primarily driven by the WS requirements.

[aidanjt]

...but John Bridgman is correct in that we historically have been involved in Linux primarily driven by the WS requirements.

When worded like that, I can both understand and agree with it.

Anyway, thanks again, to you guys for your efforts. Even though I can't make full use of my 4870 I'm grinning and bearing with it out of appreciation and understanding of the technical problems involved with rewriting a full video driver series and the recent graphics stack changes.

[mtippett]

When worded like that, I can both understand and agree with it.

Anyway, thanks again, to you guys for your efforts. Even though I can't make full use of my 4870 I'm grinning and bearing with it out of appreciation and understanding of the technical problems involved with rewriting a full video driver series and the recent graphics stack changes.

In particular, where aer your issues with the 4870, not that I can prioritize your issues over other work, but I am interested none the less.

Regards,

Matthew

[aidanjt]

In particular, where aer your issues with the 4870, not that I can prioritize your issues over other work, but I am interested none the less.

Mostly older bugs which are now fixed according to your changelogs, and kernel/xorg-server incompatibilities, then there was the gentoo fglrx maintainer, who lost interest (and obviously that isn't AMD's fault) but that's changed now. Although I haven't tried fglrx 9.7 yet, but I plan to do so whenever I have the time and am in the mood to experiment.

[L33F3R]

so you should buy amd - because all amd cpus have hardware virt and nested pages, speeding up virtualization. unlike intel were only selcted cpus have hardware virt - and you have to choose between raw speed, sse versions and virtualization...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization

just for reference

[energyman]

from that side:

>Not all recent Intel processors support VT-x as Intel uses the feature to segment their market.[6] The following Intel processors include support for VT-x:[7]

[L33F3R]

yes. the need for visualization goes down as you get into the celeron/sempron markets.