Arch Linux Revolts Against ATI Catalyst Driver

[MostAwesomeDude]

As for the radeonhd driver mentioned on the mailinglist as alternative: these people don't maintain the drivers related to X.Org and don't know which driver belongs to which chip exactly. For some newer chips the radeonhd driver works, but for most others the ati driver is the driver they need. Making fun out of someone on a public news site because he inofficially states that the radeonhd driver is an alternative is not a nice thing to do.

I'm the only person that's mentioned it so far, and I've hardly been making fun. After all, if Arch chose to force radeonhd above radeon, they wouldn't be the first; Ubuntu does that as well. I'm just saying that I find it odd.

[RealNC]

It's also odd that there are two drivers. There should be only one.

[jonnycat26]

I'd kept hearing about ATI improving, and catching up, and phoronix would often imply they they were on feature parity with nvidia.
(note to self, features like crossfire etc.. don't matter. we care about Xserver support, and compositing)

I went down the same path as you. I was a longtime Linux + NVidia user, and when I needed to upgrade my video card I fell for the Phoronix propaganda about ATI.

Not that the card itself is bad, for a 70 dollar card (HD4650). it runs rings around any NVidia at a similar price point. It runs cool, and the power draw is low. But none of that matters if the drivers don't work, and fglrx just doesn't.

I'm back with NVidia. Maybe I'll pull the ATI out of the closet at some point, when ATI puts out a few stable fglrx releases in a row, but who knows how far ahead NV will be at that point.

I've sent Michael a couple of PMs saying that he should stop doing al these gaming benchmarks comparing ATI/Nvidia.

I don't think Michael has to stop, but the fact that the results don't mention that fglrx is... stability challenged... is kind of misleading.

[BlackStar]

As to the query near the beginning of the topic regarding GLSL, the state of it is that GLSL will probably show up in classic Mesa when somebody actually cares enough to write it, and in Gallium when I start supporting programmable shaders.

Ah great, I know whom to bug now

I wouldn't expect Mesa to pick GLSL support now that Gallium has been merged, the question was more in the spirit of "when will we have a prototype to test?" (AKA "are we there yet?") Annoying, I know, but this stuff will really make the FOSS drivers viable for all but the most specialiazed workstation users (so thanks for your work!)

A common OpenGL state tracker and GLSL compiler for all FOSS drivers - now that's something to look forward to.

...and sorry for derailing the thread.

[bugmenot]

I think it is good that they seem to take radeonhd and not radeon, not only because of the audio over hdmi support.

[RagingDragon]

[...]
I've sent Michael a couple of PMs saying that he should stop doing al these gaming benchmarks comparing ATI/Nvidia.

Most of us don't care if ATI gets 3fps more in some game.

A decent graphics card review would cover the IMPORTANT THINGS. namely compiz support, compositing, 2D performance,vdpau support, Power managing, ease of install, Xorg tweaks, support in x64, delays in support of XServer, DRI2 etc..

Those are the deciding factors when buying a graphics card for use in Linux

Most of us don't game in linux. We use linux for other reasons.

ATI, are you listening?

Personally I'd like the Phoronix reviews to cover both gaming and other issues. I like to play games (though my time is more limited now ), but I also use my computer for other things.

I'm running Arch64 and have an AMD 4850 - at the time I bought it the AMD/ATI drivers sucked less than the Nvidia ones. However, today Nvidia's GT200's are very tempting...

[kensai]

I do care about this drivers...

Well, the news were well laid out by phoronix, is true I started ranting about the quality of this drivers. Since I can, because I own an nvidia and an ati card. In both machines I use Linux, and have never had trouble with nvidia, on the contrary with ati, even if the driver has become better, it is still too buggy. But, the things that were omitted were when I said, I do cared about the drivers:
Feb 25

PS: I do use this drivers, so I do care about them, but this is a choice that had to be made.

Feb 26

My reason for it to go to community is so a TU can dedicate attention to it, Andreas does not want to waste time on fixing this drivers as theyare of no particular interest to him.

OK, I'm in a bit of a puzzle right now. As I have just installed the 9.2 catalyst in arch64 and tested them all running fine.

Here, the symlinking problem was the only thing still bugging me.

After thinking it all over, I don't want Arch users to feel
uncomfortable or affected by our decisions on this, I am all in for lets make things work so the user benefit at the end. So I am up for
reconsideration of this.

Mar 1

Yeah, I tried to find a solution of how to work this out and keep catalyst at least in community, but it seems, ATI/AMD just aren't doing a thing to improve the situation. Yet, this package is so important for some users of Arch Linux that a TU should be the one in charge of them.

You see, I have tried, but in the end there is nothing I could do, but to start all over again and thing, this should be removed from the official repositories.

- Cheers

Eduardo "kensai" Romero

[iVistux]

Not that spectacular

What Arch is doing is not that spectacular, see Fedora, etc. refusing to let the driver settle in their repositories. The driver was always available by 3rd-party-repositories or other sources, now Arch created the same situation.

Unfortunately the proprietary driver is not good for everybody, but its stand is still better then years ago, he's made for people buying Linux-Notebooks from Dell or users using a FireGL/Pro. Fedora/Arch/Gentoo are often too bleeding edge for this driver.

[kensai]

What Arch is doing is not that spectacular, see Fedora, etc. refusing to let the driver settle in their repositories. The driver was always available by 3rd-party-repositories or other sources, now Arch created the same situation.

Of course is spectacular, Fedora has always rejected closed source applications. We have never done so, a lot pf us use closer source applications when they are better than the open source implementation. I do not use Windows, because it is not better than Linux, but I do use nvidia driver and ati driver because they are better than the open source version. Still in the case of ATI, they are a pain to deal with, and haven't been working on non-multilib distributions since 8.12 that is two releases behind of what is currently used. So this is not a matter of politics, about we taking a stance against closed source like fedora, is taking a stance aginst closed source applications that does not want to play fair with Linux.

[remm]

you're the one who's making ME laugh

Apparently, you are happy using a proprietary binary driver that never actually worked that well for me. So that does not work for me, I want a good free driver.

Besides, there's a limit to the level of arrogance I can tolerate from people, if you see what I mean ...