AMD Dropping R300-R500 Support In Catalyst Driver

[chrisr]

It's a problem of timing.

I kind of find this situation odd.

It sounds like you're lucky enough not to be affected, then. Personally, I was expecting the R300/R400 support to vanish fairly soon, but the R500 range is still (to my mind) a current product with no alternative Open Source driver that I can use.

[energyman]

Linux energy 2.6.28.5r4 #1 SMP Wed Feb 18 00:14:37 CET 2009 x86_64 AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6000+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux

fglrxinfo
display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI Radeon HD 3870
OpenGL version string: 2.1.8494 Release

2.6.28 is not a problem. And everybody using fedora asks for trouble. That is what you get for using a testing ground for RHEL. If you want a stable basis - use something else. ubuntu, opensuse, RHEL/centos, sles, sled, slackware.

[lordmozilla]

2.6.28 is not a problem. And everybody using fedora asks for trouble. That is what you get for using a testing ground for RHEL. If you want a stable basis - use something else. ubuntu, opensuse, RHEL/centos, sles, sled, slackware.

I'm not a big fedora fan, but you do realise opensuse is a testing ground for SLES/SLED ?

[energyman]

sure - but opensuse does not force you to use pre-alpha X versions or known broken-for-users KDE 4.0 or experimental kernel patches/features known to eat your data.

[adamk]

I think that the legacy branch should be updated for newer X servers and kernels, otherwise this is a good move

I think that's the single biggest source of complaints.. The fact is, the legacy branch won't be updated for those items. So, then, you also believe that this is not a good move :-)

Adam

[Veerappan]

As energyman has said, fglrx 9.2 works just fine on 2.6.28 kernels. I'm running it just fine on my Radeon 4850 at home. Wine in Ubuntu on x86_64 is a bit iffy, but it always has been for me with fglrx (although it seems to be improving slowly).

As for dropping r300-r500 support from fglrx, I think it's a great move. It got me to try out the open source radeon (non-hd) driver for the first time in a long time, and it's been going great. My laptop is happier now than when I was using fglrx. Compositing via Compiz works great, GL is accelerated, and I've got tear-free video. After enabling the DynamicClocks option, and enabling EXA my laptop is working better than it has in a long time. Before the announcement last week about support being dropped, I hadn't given the radeon driver a chance for about 2-3 years. A lot of work has been done in that time, and it seems to be paying off.

I haven't tried TV-out on it yet, and I haven't hooked up any external monitors, but looking at Xorg.0.log says it's detecting stuff correctly at least.

[primefalcon]

Does this affect the x1300 card?

[dkasak]

I actually find this pretty funny. I have to say "I told you so" ( though I'm too lazy to find a link, I predicated EXACTLY this when people started reporting that r300 support was broken ).

I just bought a laptop with an integrated r600 chip. So for the past couple of months, I've been using fglrx so I can use ecomorph ( port of compiz to run on enlightenment ). If only r600+ chips will be supported, then I must say that fglrx can only be considered 'alpha' quality, because my experience with fglrx on r600 has been pretty poor indeed. 2D rendering is glacial - I assume there is no 2D acceleration at all - the RadeonHD driver is *way* ahead in this regard. I've seen benchmarks on Phoronix that claim the opposite, and I find that completely contrary to reality. 3D acceleration is reasonable ( I don't play games, but compiz / ecomorph seems to work ... mostly ), but quite unstable. I get regular 5-second+ pauses where the system appears to lock, and then magically revive itself. I get rendering glitches, flashing trangles, etc. The itask-ng launcher / dock thing in E17 doesn't render *anything* with fglrx other than the text pop-up with the application name ... ie no icon or bar or anything. I get a kernel oops when restarting X, followed very quickly by a hard lockup. Ouch! And AMD claim this as 'supported', eh? God knows what shape r700 support is in ...

An interesting question is what AMD has to say for people who bought laptops with a <600 chip. Sure there's the open-source driver, which they very recently released docs for, but there are important pieces missing. My old laptop, for example, recently suffered catastrohpic failure which I'm starting to think was an overheating issue in the 3D chip. There's very little power/thermal management stuff in the open-source drivers. It's easy to tell PC owners to pull out a wad of cash and buy the latest video card, but it's not quite that simple for laptop owners. Not that it affects me personally, but I would hardly call this deprecation and the resulting user experience 'graceful'. It also begs the question: when will the current alpha-quality r600 support be deprecated? When the r800 is released? I know ... I know ... fglrx is not for linux desktop users ... it's for graphics workstation users. The point is that you don't pull the rug out from under NEW customers until there is a smooth transition to the open-source drivers. Well I wouldn't anyway.

Anyway, I've already switched to 2D-only RadeonHD, as I'm sick of seeing messages in my kernel output about replaying resierfs transactions. Since doing that, my bitterness has given way to amusement at watching the current sitation unfold.

[energyman]

easy: people with old hardware have a wide range of distributions with several years of support to choose from. ubuntu lts, rhel, centos, sles, sled.

[Nille]

Debian to kann nicht jemand mal ein skript schreiben wo leute die devplatformen einsetzen wie fedora und den fglrx nutzen einfach ausgeblendet werden ? w?rde man sich viel m?he sparen!

or a script to remove all non English Post in an English forum It is not nice to Speak in a English forum German.