Originally posted by libv
View Post
When AMD bought ATI in 2006 one of the concerns that bubbled up was that fglrx was not a good fit for some of the AMD customer use cases, and that we really needed to either get back to supporting open source driver development or come up with another solution that could provide comparable ease of use.
As I learned later there were two main planning exercises resulting from this - one in the GPU SW team and another in the server CPU team working with SUSE. I was part of the GPU SW planning effort and wrote the final proposal with a lot of input from others.
Along the way two things happened:
1. While I was catching up with the current state of open source GPU drivers I noticed a couple of forum posts saying essentially "if AMD was serious about open source drivers they would call Dave Airlie and ask him what they should do" - so I did just that. Dave told me about the KMS idea that he and a couple of people were working on and suggested that I also talk to Alex Deucher - this would have been around May 2007 - and we all worked together on the proposal. Luc, I gather you still don't believe any of this ?
2. The AMD server folks working with SUSE suggested that we include SUSE in the initial driver effort. That seemed reasonable since the SUSE working relationship was already in place so we tweaked the proposal (I had been thinking about Tungsten Graphics based on previous ATI projects), took it to the executives, and received approval.
Originally posted by libv
View Post
There were honest differences in terms of technical priorities - we wanted a quick/simple user modesetting X driver using AtomBIOS so we could focus on 3D and KMS and built our plan around getting to acceleration as quickly as possible, while you felt that getting a really polished user mode X driver was the top priority, that VBIOS had no place in a graphics driver, and that 3D/drm and KMS were less important.
At the end of the day though, the key difference seemed to be that we thought we were working with you to implement our plan, while you felt that you were saving AMD from us and implementing the SUSE proposal you had helped to write. If you think about both sides of the story and try to focus on actual events rather than only remembering your interpretations at the time then the history will make a lot more sense... and maybe we can go back to drinking beer at conferences and arguing about the future instead of this.
Originally posted by libv
View Post
IIRC your "competing driver" comment refers to using radeon to support acceleration work since drm support was not yet available in RadeonHD - does that ring a bell ? I don't remember the details (it was 11 years ago after all) but it was something like that.
Leave a comment: