AMD Catalyst 7.11 Linux Driver

[kir?]

with previous drivers you had to add an option like

XVoverlay "on" or somethinf to get Xv output
but with this one even xv works out of the box

after the
aticonfig --initial

i dont have a xvoverlay line in xorg.conf,

for me worked before too

[Crunchy]

i don't understand why to me this driver doesn't give problems....
i have an x200m which works better and better with every release, a radeon 9550 256 which works flawlessly, a x1000 which works without problems and a hd2600pro which works out of the box.
all of them work without problems and i really can't understand why the people aren't able to use the drivers and always go blaming on the driver.
this things should have happened to me too.... but i don't have really relevant problems with gentoo and opensuse 10.3 when installing and using them.
i can also compile and use suspend with both slub and slab and with 2.6.24-r releases (but it works only once refusing to go on suspend/hibernate the second time that you chose the same option).
on this forum the people just complains about various problems but i don't really experience them and that makes me wonder this question:
are you really sure that these issues are driver dependent and not distro dependent?!

Great for you, the driver works. Doesn't mean it will work for everyone else!

The "official stable" 8.40 thinks my x1950 Pro AGP is PCIE so doesn't enable AGP at all. The latest driver spits out an error which I can find no solution for. 8.34.8 does work but 3D performance is poor.

When I spend a lot of money on a piece of hardware I DO expect driver support!

Unless a driver is marked as beta I DO expect it to work! I DO expect it to be stable!

[aoanla]

It's also amazing how people are fine with an open source driver not being compatible with older interfaces (e.g if xserver 1.4 was supported but 1.3 was not) and yet if proprietary drivers did that, shame on them!

Because no one can fix issues in a proprietary driver but the official developers, for a start

Meh, I've got nothing against people complaining about drivers, just I don't like it being a knee-jerk reaction without any real reason.

I don't see anyone complaining about fglrx for "no good reason". Or don't you think that, for example, the severe OpenGL memory leak for R500 cards is a good reason?

In all other aspects, everything works just fine for me, and I'm quite content with the progress ati are making. And if people are so convinced that nvidia's drivers are so much better, then go get nvidia hardware - but check to see the problems they have first!

I have. I've been reading the nvnews forums for about two months now, following the discussions over the driver bugs which exist in the current nvidia drivers. There is no showstopping bug like the fglrx memory leak, and currently nvidia 2d performance in the 169.04 driver is higher than that in fglrx.
In addition, I notice that the nVidia devs actually respond to bug reports on that forum, and usually try to provide some updates on the progress of fixes.
Note that it took nVidia less than 3 weeks to provide a driver supporting the 8800GT - it took somewhat longer than that for ATI to support its last new set of hardware.

[fhuberts]

bye bye ati

well,

after being pissed off for a few months by the dismal quality of what ATI calls a driver I today replaced my 1950xt with a 8600gts and it feels like a breeze of warm air. the driver just works. aiglx, compiz, no more artifacts in the lower right corner, etc. etc.

too bad I can't replace the gfx in my T60 :-(

I do have high hopes for the open source effort of the ATI stuff however. when that works I will switch back! David Airlies blog is a regular read....

[subvertigo]

Is anyone able to use Suspend/Hibernation with this 7.11 release on Gutsy (2.6.22 kernel) ?
I hoped it would work, but nothing... it crashed and remain in black screen when using suspend/hibernation. Solutions?
I've also edited the /etc/default/acpi_support trying different configurarions, but nothing...

[Berniyh]

Is anyone able to use Suspend/Hibernation with this 7.11 release on Gutsy (2.6.22 kernel) ?
I hoped it would work, but nothing... it crashed and remain in black screen when using suspend/hibernation. Solutions?
I've also edited the /etc/default/acpi_support trying different configurarions, but nothing...

I guess it is the old problem with the SLUB allocator.

[waobagger]

I guess it is the old problem with the SLUB allocator.

I have the same problem.
I use SLAB and it worked with 8.42.3 and kernel 2.6.22.x (x86-64).

I experience several annoying bugs:
- screen corruption in lower/right corner;
- corruption around mouse pointer;
- memory leak in 3D apps;
- crash when I close the lid;
- instability when I switch to text mode and back;
- flicker while viewing movies.

I at least had working suspend/resume.
Now I don't. This is a serious showstopper for a laptop.
I can't see a single improvement in the last version.

Has anyone managed to get suspend/resume with X1400?

[djdoo]

My experience with 7.11 driver in comparison with 8.42.3 one:

The good points...
1) AMD Control Panel works now in openSuSE 10.3
2) The driver now recognizes correctly the shared memory I specify in BIOS for my RS690G graphics chip
3) 3D is a bit better
4) No corruption at low right corner

Now the bad points:
1) Memory Leak is still present
2) Still my AVIVO chip cannot use XV video overlay
3) Sync2Vblank feature doesn't seem to work with Compiz-Fusion
4) Suspend-Standby still are not usable
5) When will someone from ATI modernize the driver's documendation?? In a month 2008 will arrive you know and the documentation comes from the previous century...
6) I still find nowhere a readme like the nvidia driver has to talk with details about the xorg.conf options the driver can use and how to use.
7) Still XvMC seems to be a far dream for fglrx...

AIGLX performance is in the same levels with the previous driver, works well for me...

Hope the ATI devs to take care of the above issues as soon as possible now that they will have new personnel to make the job faster...

I won't compare the 7.11 driver with the nvidia's one cause in my opinion that's not the point. The point for me is to make a full functional Video driver and to have a full functional modern open-source driver to support also the older GPUs and to interact with the proprietary one in order to have fast progress for both of the drivers and finally make the LINUX experience better for the ATI users.

All the best...

Jim

[Mota_boy]

djdoo di you installed the driver by --buildpkg so on, or did you use Yast?
I`m now getting installed 7.11 to mine 10.3 suse and try to work this so, that there don`t come pssible troubles.

Ps. sorry my little rusty english

[subvertigo]

I guess it is the old problem with the SLUB allocator.

No in theory the 7.11 is compatible with kernel 2.6.23 that have default SLUB memory allocator...