AMD 8.38.6 Display Driver Released -- The Least To Report On Driver In Two Years

[sundown]

i only hope for bugfixes and new xorg/kernel support. i don't expect any new functionality from ati.

How can you hope only for that? I refuse to believe that ATi are that stupid. Besides, ain't it certain that the new OpenGL will come in August? That ought to be some sort of a "functionality".

[yoshi314]

that's just because all that waiting for all that new functionality worn me out.

i just don't care anymore. i'm tired of waiting.

besides i feel like being a unvoluntary beta tester. they give me a sub-par driver with lots of broken features and expect to deal with it.

btw. code is supposed to be shared across win and linux drivers (or maybe it isn't?). how come r600 support still didn't make it into linux?

i guess next release will be called "8.35 still does it better" :]

[the-me]

It seems like the composite extension is now available. See:

http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=48

The XVideo bugs from 8.36 and 8.37 are now fixed again and the gdm/kdm hardlock bug seems to be fixed completly in 8.38.6 now.

[lenrek]

... I refuse to believe that ATi are that stupid...

To be honest, it is difficult for me to believe, they actually care about Linux support...

[d2kx]

The release notes say that we still have to disable Composite?

[karthikrg]

Section "Module"
Load "dbe"
# Load "extmod"
SubSection "extmod"
Option "omit XVideo"
Option "omit XVideo-MotionCompensation"
Option "omit XFree86-VidModeExtension"
EndSubSection
Load "fbdevhw"
Load "glx"
Load "record"
Load "freetype"
Load "type1"
Load "dri"
EndSection

X server hardlock problem solved by disabling xvideo as above.. still get DRI with 8.38.6.. phew!! at last after 6 months

[lenrek]

The release notes say that we still have to disable Composite?

From the release notes:

Corruption may be observed with certain applications on some Linux distributions which enable the Composite extension by default, e.g., RHEL 5. If you are observing application corruption, please disable the Composite extension. Further details can be found in topic number 737-28224

So, there maybe some problem for certain situation. However, interestingly, I manage to enable both Composite + DRI (for the first time)!

# grep Composite /var/log/Xorg.0.log
(**) Extension "Composite" is enabled

# grep DRI /var/log/Xorg.0.log
(II) Loading extension XFree86-DRI
(**) fglrx(0): Option "NoDRI" "no"
(**) fglrx(0): NoDRI = NO
(II) Loading extension ATIFGLRXDRI
(II) fglrx(0): doing DRIScreenInit
(II) fglrx(0): DRIScreenInit done
(II) fglrx(0): DRI initialization successfull!
(II) fglrx(0): [DRI] installation complete

So far, no problem yet...

EDIT: Unfortunately, if I run xcompmgr -c, I got a lot of screen corruption (as stated in the release notes). So, even though I can enable it in the xorg.conf, it is still not usable. But, I guess this can be reason to be hopeful. Maybe the next release will be better.

[karthikrg]

hmm DRI+composite.. so this driver has something after all.. and my fglrx has worked for the first time after 8.32.5..

[lowlands]

I'm deeply disappointed with ATI that they did not fix their driver to work properly with Fedora 7. I understand that RHEL5 is more important from a commercial point of view. But wait a minute, RHEL5 is pretty much FC6. Wasn't that already working?! What were ATI's developers doing last month?! Clueless PHB directives withstanding, this release really should at least have had support for F7.

ATI: assuming F7 support will be in the next release (and I'll prolly win the lottery too...) the driver is still lacking AIXGL. This story is getting very lame and one can read in comments here and on the web that people are getting rather tired with the way ATI is treating them.

ATI: you are pushing your luck with your users and prospects beyond comprehension. You do realize that if you do not provide your market with the features they need that they will vote with their dollars (next time) when they need to buy a new GPU, right?

ATI: do the right thing and release a new driver with X.org 1.3 (F7 and prolly others) support this week or at the most next week. It's the least you can do to compensate for your (hopefully still) loyal customers.

[lenrek]

hmm DRI+composite.. so this driver has something after all.. and my fglrx has worked for the first time after 8.32.5..

Well... At least something new, after more than 1 and half year of using ATi...