AMD Dropping R300-R500 Support In Catalyst Driver

[bulletxt]

good bye and good luck. You will be angry again when others enjoy kms and you are stuck with nvidia.

Lol if you really believe AMD will become the leader in GPU Linux market then fine, you're free to believe it.

If you look at history (including today), there is not even 1 reason to believe it considering NVIDIA continuous work. There is a reason if NVIDIA is the leader in the Linux market since year 2001. But no, you guys are too blind to listening at AMD fairy tales.

[pawstar]

it doesn't 'loose support' The old drivers will continue to work. Or will the windows driver stop working with the release of 9.5? No! Nobody forces you to update the drivers. And with win7 your hardware is unsupported anyway - so what are you complaining about?

What makes you say my hardware is unsupported? I've got equipment which can run vista which is far more resource intensive than Win7. The only problem will be the video card. You just can't expect one to go and buy a new one after 2 years of just spending more than $500 on one can you?

The current drives do not work - they never had under linux, so they will not continue to work - where is my working video overlay, where is working rotation, where is working multi-monitor and above all where is the stability. So many bugs with the later r500 models (i.e. what I have) that its not even funny. Coincidentally, 9.2 borked and I had no video output on my system. I had to go back to 9.1.

I cannot and will not remain with an old os - and why should I. It DOES LOOSE SUPPORT because newer Xorg and Kernel upgrades will bork the driver. Maybe you can't seem to understand that some of us need the new features that come out - even be it just stabilized support for other hardware in later releases of the kernel.

And linux? Well - the opensource activities happened for a reason. You want better opensource drivers? Then sit down on your ass and start coding.

Why should I? I paid good money for a card and I expect the company who got my $$$ to support the product they sold me. I've got far more important things to do than to screw around with writing my own drivers.

I've been hearing about the promise of opensource drivers for too long. That carrot-on-a-stick routine is way too tiring now. Already waiting 2 years and now told to wait even more for a working driver is not acceptable business practice IMO.

[pawstar]

Someone may wish to explain to AMD that x1000 is not a legacy architecture. Products are being released with this tech "today"

Dead on! I know the laptop that I have with the X1700 video card continued to be on sale in the mainstream until less than a year ago. And the video card is not upgradeable. After spending that much money on it, you can't just throw it out because of some stupid driver issue with a video card and spend a few g's again. That would be insane especially in this crappy economic climate..

[bridgman]

What makes you say my hardware is unsupported? I've got equipment which can run vista which is far more resource intensive than Win7. The only problem will be the video card. You just can't expect one to go and buy a new one after 2 years of just spending more than $500 on one can you?

Microsoft usually maintains ABI compatibility across at least a couple of generations of OS (ie several years). Vista can normally work with XP video drivers, for example. Linux changes the API and ABI exposed to binary drivers with almost every new kernel release.

The current drives do not work - they never had under linux, so they will not continue to work - where is my working video overlay, where is working rotation, where is working multi-monitor and above all where is the stability. So many bugs with the later r500 models (i.e. what I have) that its not even funny. Coincidentally, 9.2 borked and I had no video output on my system. I had to go back to 9.1.

The 5xx generation of GPUs don't have the kind of video overlay you remember from earlier hardware. It's not a question of driver support.

Rotation and multi-monitor should both be supported in the open drivers today.

My impression was that stability with the open drivers was very good today; have you tried them recently ?

I cannot and will not remain with an old os - and why should I. It DOES LOOSE SUPPORT because newer Xorg and Kernel upgrades will bork the driver. Maybe you can't seem to understand that some of us need the new features that come out - even be it just stabilized support for other hardware in later releases of the kernel.

Again, the open drivers not only evolve with the new distros but they are often used to create the new features you are looking for.

I've been hearing about the promise of opensource drivers for too long. That carrot-on-a-stick routine is way too tiring now. Already waiting 2 years and now told to wait even more for a working driver is not acceptable business practice IMO.

Just curious, what are you waiting for from the open drivers ? AFAIK for your card (I'm guessing high end 5xx ?) they have caught up with fglrx in every area except gaming performance already.

Dead on! I know the laptop that I have with the X1700 video card continued to be on sale in the mainstream until less than a year ago. And the video card is not upgradeable. After spending that much money on it, you can't just throw it out because of some stupid driver issue with a video card and spend a few g's again. That would be insane especially in this crappy economic climate..

I don't think anyone is saying "throw the card out", are we ? We're just saying "from this point on we're going to be delivering support via the open source drivers".

[Ant P.]

There is a reason if NVIDIA is the leader in the Linux market since year 2001.

The same reason Windows XP is the leader in the OS market since 2001 - inertia. nVidia put out a working driver at a time when nothing else worked.

Also I should point out here that I'm using an ATi card from that era with more effects than Vista can crap out, whereas I've got an almost equal spec nVidia card gathering dust in a drawer, because they added that infamous black window bug then dropped support days later. Funny how compiz ran fine on it at one point, but that's forced obsolescence for you.

[Melf]

Well, this is an interesting coincidence
I have just switched to the open source radeon driver on my laptop(ubuntu 8.10, asus f3jr, mobility radeon x2300 = RV535(?)).
I switched because of stability problems with the catalyst driver(fullscreen video in through xv in compiz would lead to hard freeze).
This are my impressions so far:
+its very stable, suspend works, hibernation thorough s2disk too, everything while running compiz
+video is without ANY flickering in compiz, xv has good antitearing support and 720p video is watchable
-performance as measured by glxgears is roughly cut in half in comparison to the catylst driver(1100 vs 2000+) but the number is the same with and without compiz(on the catalyst, it was always lower with compiz)
-some 3D aps dont work
-problems with some aplications that run 3D in fullscreen in compiz,
looks like if scaling is not implemented (ap. wants to run 800*600 in fullscreen but it appears on a black screen in a box) and sometimes things *behind* a fullscreen aplication (gnome resource monitor etc.) flicker through,it can be solved by running the aplication in a window or without compiz (looks like without compiz the scaling works ok)
-the power management is probably not working, but I have not noticed any bigger difference, maybe it wast working before at all
-there is no setup utility, you can get info from xorg.log and settings go as usual to xorg.conf when neaded
-some minor corruption from timer to time but nothing showstopping

I have tried the radeonhd driver too but I got just 300fps in glxgears, maybe I forgot to add some options to xorg.conf ?

All in all I am quite pleased. I finally managed to achieve my main obejective, to have:
*stability
*suspend,hibernation
*good video playback
*compiz
all at the same time.
I would say that the open source radeon driver is not bad at all!
There are Ubuntu packages with radeon 1.6.11 and radeonhd 1.24 available so you can try the newest oss drivers yourselve.

https://launchpad.net/~tormodvolden/+archive/ppa

These packages are unofficial and HIGHLY experimental, so be carefull
(Text console boot options and ssh access may come in handy

[kraftman]

Obviously, these people don't know what they are talking about ...

More seriously, if you are interested in Linux and open source, then you should buy your hardware thinking about using it with open source drivers. Otherwise, there's really no point, you could use Windows with the same open source applications that you use on Linux.

There are hundreds more reasons why I use Linux instead windowses, or macoses.

The only use of the blobs are for waiting for open drivers to get there when the hardware is new.

Not exactly, but I usually choose Open Drivers instead of closed blobs.

I expect Larabee will kill NV and AMD in the Linux market

What's Larabee?

@Ant P

The same reason Windows XP is the leader in the OS market since 2001

What reason? Linux worked better for me those times and it works far better for me right now. The reason is ms monopoly.

@SyXbiT

seriously, who cares about KMS, it happens on bootup, that's it

It's much more.

[Stormking]

Stormking - you want drivers? Great - sit down and start coding! The documentation is there. AMD/ATI put everything on the table you need to improve the FOSS drivers. I am expecting you sending patches upstream soon.

Why would I? I already paid ATI to do that for me.

PS: Calling your customers - who just want what they paid for - "whiners", clearly is a statement of its own.

[bridgman]

mobility radeon x2300 = RV535(?)).

I have tried the radeonhd driver too but I got just 300fps in glxgears, maybe I forgot to add some options to xorg.conf ?

AFAIK the X2300 is RV550, more like an RV515 with an early version of UVD.

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.

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.

[duby229]

With respect, I don't think we ever promised anything except to keep improving Linux support, did we ?

The "amazing new codebase" was the 3D stack, not the rest of the driver and AFAIK that's the part everyone is upset about losing from fglrx, isn't it ?

We aren't dropping support for your hardware, as much as saying "from this point on we will be supporting your hardware via the open source driver, which we just spent a pile of time, money and effort on...".

Which is exactly what you should be doing so thank you very, very much.

For those of you that are actually complaining, here are the facts....
1: The user base for the open drivers is about to grow substantially.
2: Many of those users are bound to be programmers, primarily due to the fact that Linux tends to attract that sort of crowd.
3: Many of those programmers are going to find problems with the drivers as they are today, because well, they are incomplete.
4: Many of those unsatisfied programmers are going to do what they can to get the driver working best for them, and that helps you.

Open source development is primarily a process of elimination. This is its strength and its weakness. Strength because it facilitates a --MUCH-- larger developer base then any proprietary effort could. These developers that will be fixing there own problems couldnt do the same using a closed driver. And while they're doing it, many other people will benefit.

The goal behind open development is to organize (Organize being the key word here) as many developers working together as possible. The only effective way of increasing the base of developers is to increase the user base substantially. This effort is going to do exactly that.