Unreleased ATI Catalyst Driver Appears In Ubuntu

[dgrafenhofer]

Is there any chance that the 9.3 or 9.4 versions of catalyst will work again for Mobility Radeon HD 3650 users?

See bugreports on launchpad:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fglrx-installer/+bug/314600

https://bugs.launchpad.net/fglrx/+bug/288620

Dominik

[rotarychainsaw]

Release something! I'm bored!

[bridgman]

I was wondering if the RS880 IGP chipset will support 7.1 channel LPCM over HDMI, and if so, with support for Linux. I think that was a major shortcoming from a multimedia perspective with the 790GX chipset which I currently own.

Sorry, but I can't really talk about unreleased products. We're trying to get at least basic out-of-box support (modesetting + shadowfb) into the spring distro releases but anything more detailed will have to wait until the chip actually gets released.

Also, will TV tuning on the "All in wonder" cards be ever supported under Linux, or is that completely off the cards?

I don't think we have any plans to add that capability to the Catalyst drivers. The tuners themselves are all third party components so we wouldn't be providing programming information for those anyways. That said, the tuner vendors are usually pretty good about providing datasheets and programming info since they usually don't need to expose anything particularly secret to let you use the part.

I'm not sure about the status of capture chip support in the open drivers (the capture chip is what gets tuner output into the PC so it can be stored in a file or displayed on the screen) but will ask. If there is no support today we can look into releasing some in the future, but all the usual caveats apply (ie if we can't separate the info for normal operation from the info used for DRM-type stuff then we won't be able to release the info needed for normal operation).

[matt8]

Mr Bridgman:

Fear not; there will still be a March driver....

Hi.

I was wondering if the RS880 IGP chipset will support 7.1 channel LPCM over HDMI, and if so, with support for Linux. I think that was a major shortcoming from a multimedia perspective with the 790GX chipset which I currently own. Also, will TV tuning on the "All in wonder" cards be ever supported under Linux, or is that completely off the cards?

Thanks.

[bridgman]

Fear not; there will still be a March driver. Normally we try to ship Windows and Linux Catalyst drivers off the same release, but for March we're going to use a slightly later internal release for Linux in order to pick up some Linux-specific changes.

We'll probably do the same for April, ie use a slightly later internal release for Linux drivers than for Windows to let us get the last few March changes into the April driver as well. In internal-release-speak, the March Linux driver will probably be 8.593 for Linux vs 8.592 for Windows.

The Ubuntu driver doesn't quite match any of our regular releases -- it has server 1.6 support but doesn't have all of the other changes currently in the pipe for March and April.

[nanonyme]

It's not quite that bad; open drivers have a tough time using code from closed drivers partly because the code would need to go through IP review (and we already have a lot of that in the pipe) and partly because the closed drivers are much larger so code is usually split across a half dozen different components.

Closed drivers can use code from the open drivers more easily although again the source code architecture is usually very different so you can't just plug the code in.

Hey, don't get my hopes up too much, I might start expecting improvements.
A matter of idle pondering since no one who knows probably is allowed to say anything at this point: I sincerely hope AMD will still make a March driver release even though Ubuntu got this unreleased version of the driver. Seems Windows already got their own 9.3.

[bridgman]

It's not quite that bad; open drivers have a tough time using code from closed drivers partly because the code would need to go through IP review (and we already have a lot of that in the pipe) and partly because the closed drivers are much larger so code is usually split across a half dozen different components.

Closed drivers can use code from the open drivers more easily although again the source code architecture is usually very different so you can't just plug the code in.

That said, the main reason for not using code from the open driver is that it stalls the whole stack while waiting for sync-up and as a result there are a range of higher res videos which you can play on fglrx but not the open drivers unless you turn off the syncing. I can't say "these 3 videos" because it totally depends on the system hardware, but there have been a bunch of reports like this.

The real solution is getting the stack fixed; page flip in Compiz/KDE/whatever, then flow control back up the stack so that rendering can go full speed without anything having to spin waiting for sync, with logic in the video part to double-up or skip frames as needed. For the case of a single video stream whose native frame/field rate was close to the display frequency (say 30/60 Hz video with a 60 Hz display), fine-tuning the refresh rate would also help. The current code might be a good short term fix though as long as it can be turned on and off easily.

[nanonyme]

@bridgman

Is it possible to use a similar code like in the current oss drivers for xv? Because I still see tearing even with those updated fglrx drivers (and that even without compiz). I know how this looks - vdpau has got similar issues when composite is active. Maybe the fglrx dev do not look sharp enough when they test it or the test movie is in slowmotion

Afaik it's like this: open drivers can't use source code from closed drivers due to NDA's and closed drivers can't use source code from open drivers due to licenses. Gotta love 'em lawyers, huh?

[Kano]

@bridgman

Is it possible to use a similar code like in the current oss drivers for xv? Because I still see tearing even with those updated fglrx drivers (and that even without compiz). I know how this looks - vdpau has got similar issues when composite is active. Maybe the fglrx dev do not look sharp enough when they test it or the test movie is in slowmotion

[tarzan]

By the way, the new driver shipped with Ubuntu is still broken for Lenovo T400 users (blank screen when logging in, machine seems to work fine). I think the last working version was 8.11? The machine features a Radeon HD 3470 gpu.