The Truth About ATI/AMD & Linux

[Michael]

We will be providing a follow up article at Phoronix in the coming days about this article and specifically AMD will be providing some additional responses. I have also been talking with some Free Desktop developers about AMD's R200 specs and their comments will be included as well. Phoronix also welcomes any quality-written freelance editorials that you may want to share about display drivers and Linux.

[Brotherred]

I think I speak here for a fairly wide swath of GNU/Linux developers and distributors:

While the quality of the driver and it's release is of some importance, the license of that driver is the deal breaker.

Give us a poor driver with a free (as in freedom) license and the community will make it great.

Give us an excellent driver with a proprietary license and only a minority of users will use it.

Why?

Many distros (I'll use Fedora as an example) will not package proprietary drivers. Ubuntu, which I believe is the most popular right now, is on the fence and, at the very least, warns the user.

This is part of the fundamental nature of GNU/Linux: It's about freedom. Does AMD understand this yet? It doesn't seem so.

Moreso, because most free software developers ignore ATI's drivers as proprietary, there is little GNU/Linux software that takes advantage of the higher end cards. The DRI drivers on an r200/r300 card work just fine for almost everything.

Why would a user, then, pay $100+ for a higher-end video card when a $35 Radeon 9250 is better supported? For users it's thus a choice of price/benefit if nothing else.

If AMD wants to work better with our community they need to join our community. Break the closed development loop in favor of integrating their paid developers and "volunteer" driver developers, there's a number of skilled developers with DRI that I'm sure would be very willing to help should AMD do this.

Via has done this to some extent with their free drivers.

DITTO and that is why as a exclusive AMD CPU user and current ATI user I am so pissed of at them. How do they dare tell us how hard they are working when they could make it so much easier on them selves. KISS OFF AMD/ATI! Go dig your self a grave!

[Brotherred]

Oh and I did not know the licence that the Intel drivers were under. I am how ever in love with the GPLv*** and was thinking and hoping that was the license used.

[Regenwald]

here is a comparable article about nvidia driver development:

http://www.abclinuxu.cz/clanky/rozhovory/andy-ritger-nvidia?page=1

[yoshi314]

heh i was just about to do the same thing :]

[bgreen]

here is a comparable article about nvidia driver development:
http://www.abclinuxu.cz/clanky/rozho...-nvidia?page=1

Thanks for that URL!
I hadn't heard about NVidia's 'CUDA' toolkit before. Thats great.
ATI may have their "Stream Computing" initiative, but its not very attractive to a SciVis person who wants a single platform that supports both GPGPU programming *and* GLSL-based GPU programming.

Rather than bickering at ATI, I think I should be bickering at Lenovo for putting ATI cards in their otherwise lovely Thinkpad laptops. I love my thinkpad, but my FireGL card is a virtual paperweight. If it weren't for the Thinkpad, I would not have to bother with these pathetic ATI drivers at all.

Does anyone have any idea why Lenovo went with ATI over NVidia for the high-end Thinkpads?

[chilinux]

I have also been talking with some Free Desktop developers about AMD's R200 specs...

But take note that you still can't provide an URL where anyone can download the AMD R200 specs.

"some Free Desktop developers" != "community"

Anyone that was interested in joining the Blackdown port of JDK to Linux could do so because Sun/Javasoft was responsive to inqueries to join that developer program. But if you take the time to read ATI/Linux developer mailing lists then you will find the same is not true of ATI. Talking to less than 1% of the FOSS developement community also does not change the fact that ATI is unresponsive to inqueries to get the specifications.

AMD has also failed to change the tendency of ATI lies of claiming to "provide" to the "community" while actually blowing off inqueries to join their developer support program. The **RESULTS** still do **NOT** match the PR. Also, long standing bug issues regarding their binary drivers still go unacknowledged both in terms of getting back to the person reporting the issue and in terms of providing it as a known issue in the release notes.

And AMD has completely failed to get ATI to honor it press release announcement of the ATI VHA SDK for Linux which claimed ATI has a *commitment* to providing hardware accel iDCT support on Linux. The incompetence of AMD/ATI to live up to their own PR's statements continues to this day.

Given the trend that has been allowed to continue under AMD, I am confident that the following issues will still exist at the end of this year:

1) Developers that got the R200 specs will still be required to not directly distribute the docs to anyone else including other interested GNU/Linux developers

2) Majority of requests from the developer community for the full R200 specs will go unanswered by AMD

3) AMD will continue to use the "unoffical" status of the linux binary drivers to excuse the poor quality and support provided

4) AMD will continue to keep the binary driver bug database secret to avoid revealing the actual level of incompetence in addressing known issues

5) Despite all the above (and also failing to acknowledge them), AMD PR will continue to claim to be providing for the community

[Michael]

But take note that you still can't provide an URL where anyone can download the AMD R200 specs.

"some Free Desktop developers" != "community"

I never said I was providing an URL. That is up to AMD. AMD and the open-source developers will be providing additional information in an upcoming post.

In the mean time, you can see some of David Airlie's comments at http://www.michaellarabel.com/index.php?k=blog&i=234

[Svartalf]

In the mean time, you can see some of David Airlie's comments at http://www.michaellarabel.com/index.php?k=blog&i=234

That alone kind of confirms what I understood the situation to be. In all honesty, if they'd just open that DevRel access to select developers, it'd be better than most everything. ATI's silicon is actually rather good and high performing- it's just that their driver efforts, especially in the OpenGL arena for the last 5 years, have been their undoing. ATI's been heavy in chasing that DirectX beast- and it's part of why they got the X-Box 360 deal they did instead of NVidia.

What they're beginning to find out at AMD is not a pretty sight, I suspect. I don't think they've quite grasped the mess they're actually in here yet- and don't quite know where to take things. Register info should probably be what they give out to resolve the problem- it's the best answer to the problem they've got.

[sundown]

Should we really care that much about R200? There are talks of R700 for Q1 2008. Should people be stuck in the past resolving DX8 issues for R200?