catalyst 9.5 seems to be out.

[energyman]

I have gentoo myself. And amdcccle is working fine. You must have screwed up somewhere. Or you run into an upgrade bug. There was one with some ebuild were remnants of the driver were not uninstalled/you got dangling symlinksm which DID made amdcccle not working Solution:
/etc/init.d/xdm stop
killall -9 X
eselect opengl set xorg-x11
emerge -C ati-drivers
symlinks -dr /
cd /usr/lib64/... and subdirs, check the X dirs remove everything ati
emerge ati-drivers
eselect opengl set ati
sync
either
/etc/init.d/xdm start
or
reboot
amdcccle works.

[mirv]

I am certain that has nothing to do with gentoo 64 and everything with your system. Like you installed without an ebuild once. Or remnants of an unclean uninstall somewhere.

I had thought so too - at least for the latter. But it's been quite persistant through a fresh install, all kernel upgrades, all "x" upgrades (major or minor) and two different video cards. So yes, it is something to do with my system - most likely how I've set it up (gentoo doing things the way it does). I'm hoping the problems will magically disappear one day - I don't really spend much time looking into it anymore as I get along fine without amdcccle.

[albatorsk]

Ok, so I've finally gotten around to requesting the feature (through the developer feedback form) that enables vsync on XVideo. I could neither select Cat 9.5 or 9.4. I suppose that web form isn't updated very often.

Also, should I send this request for every new driver, or is once enough?

[energyman]

I am certain that has nothing to do with gentoo 64 and everything with your system. Like you installed without an ebuild once. Or remnants of an unclean uninstall somewhere.

[mirv]

Just curious: are there any areas required for the open source drivers that no developers are working on?
I personally am quite happy with fglrx drivers - I don't have any problems with them (well, I've never been able to load amdcccle, but I'm fairly certain that's something to do with gentoo 64bit).

[bridgman]

One of the reasons for having proprietary drivers is that they let you share development effort across 100% of the market, so OSes with relatively small market share can leverage development work which would have to be done anyways for other OSes. There's a multiplier effect; one developer working on maintaining an OS-specific port of shared code can deliver as much to the users as 20 or 30 developers writing code specifically for that OS.

Pulling devs off the consumer-specific aspects of fglrx would not allow an equivalent amount of progress to be made in the open source drivers, since developers working on the proprietary driver are leveraging the efforts of hundreds of other developers.

[monraaf]

Just to be clear there, the choice is to switch to the open source drivers *or* to use an older distro. For most users switching to the open source driver works well, but not all (yet). Reduction of manufacturer support for older products is not specific to fglrx though... doesn't the same risk apply to any proprietary driver ?

Exactly, that's one of the reasons why I rather don't have proprietary drivers installed on my system, and trying to convince you that open source is the way to go for AMD Besides fglrx which I'm going to nuke in about a minute I don't have any proprietary drivers installed.

The crash on fullscreen video under compositor is reported to be fixed in 9.5. I hope you were using 9.4...

... if not, please file or update a bug ticket with your system info.

I think it was 9.5 that I installed, not sure though. fglrxinfo gives me OpenGL version string: 2.1.8664

[bridgman]

I don't understand why you just don't keep fglrx for the workstation and put all development effort for features only consumers care about into the open source drivers. AMD could be nr. 1 in Linux graphics if it just decided to put some more resources in the open source drivers.

The main reasons are video decode acceleration with UVD and 3D performance for gaming. If it weren't for those two areas, I expect we would do exactly what you suggest.

These are more relevent to 6xx and above; video because 5xx and below don't have much in the way of decode hardware anyways, and 3D because the superscalar shader core on 6xx and up can really benefit from a sophisticated shader compiler. For 5xx and below we expect that the open source drivers will be able to get pretty close to fglrx in performance and features over time.

Well, I wouldn't know, I still haven't got 3D working with the open source drivers yet... But at least the open source drivers give me a tear-free Xv video output without a compositor, fglrx can't even do that...

Tear-free video without a compositor is just a matter of time and priority. For better or worse, feedback from consumer users consistently put compositor support as higher priority than video enhancements. This may have been because tearing was regarded as "a stupid bug" rather than the addition of a feature requiring a fair amount of infrastructure, but that's just a guess.

Besides the not having tear-free Xv, severe restrictions in my freedom to choose a kernel and X Server and the idea that AMD can decide at any time to kill support for my GPU, restricting me to use an obsolete distro i.e. the situation R300-R500 users are now in, lets see...

Just to be nitpicky for a minute, the choice is to switch to the open source drivers *or* to use an older distro. For most users switching to the open source driver works well, but not all (yet). Reduction of manufacturer support for older products is in no way specific to fglrx though.. is it ? Doesn't the same risk apply to all proprietary drivers ?

I have been using the open source driver lately and haven't used fglrx in a while, so to be fair I decided to give it another chance and installed it... enabled desktop effects, played a video with mplayer hit f for full screen, hit f again to leave full screen, so far so good... now hit f for full screen again, SNAFU! Screen goes black, X Server is unresponsive, have to reboot...

The crash on fullscreen video under compositor is reported to be fixed in 9.5. I hope you were using 9.4...

... if not, please file or update a bug ticket with your system info.

[energyman]

so first they were bad because they just supported fglrx and everybody screamed 'give docu, we will do rest'.
now they are bad because they don't develop the open source driver too?
what next? they are bad because they don't give away hardware for free?

I am glad that amd is improving fglrx. Since I started using amd ca 10 month ago each release has been better than the one before. I am very happy. If you want better open source drivers - start working on them - and kick the lazy bastards who always yelled that 'they' or 'we' would write the drivers - because obviously of the many thousands yellers none showed up so far ...

[monraaf]

No, but "improving consumer support" comments were in the context of the Catalyst (fglrx) driver. The fglrx driver has traditionally focused on workstation functionality and typical workstation distros only, but for the last ~18 months we have been adding support for consumer distros and adding features (eg improving the video playback, video & 3d under compositor etc..) which only the consumer market cares about.

I don't understand why you just don't keep fglrx for the workstation and put all development effort for features only consumers care about into the open source drivers. AMD could be nr. 1 in Linux graphics if it just decided to put some more resources in the open source drivers.

Sorry, but "tear free video under a compositor" is probably the last thing anyone would call simple. The open source drivers can't do that either.

Well, I wouldn't know, I still haven't got 3D working with the open source drivers yet... But at least the open source drivers give me a tear-free Xv video output without a compositor, fglrx can't even do that...

Again, the open source driver won't do what you want either. What do you think is FUBAR about fglrx other than the fact that the professional graphics business is funding the development and setting some of the priorities ?

Besides the not having tear-free Xv, severe restrictions in my freedom to choose a kernel and X Server and the idea that AMD can decide at any time to kill support for my GPU, restricting me to use an obsolete distro i.e. the situation R300-R500 users are now in, lets see...

I have been using the open source driver lately and haven't used fglrx in a while, so to be fair I decided to give it another chance and installed it... enabled desktop effects, played a video with mplayer hit f for full screen, hit f again to leave full screen, so far so good... now hit f for full screen again, SNAFU! Screen goes black, X Server is unresponsive, have to reboot...

/var/log/messages gives:

Xorg[2770]: segfault at 9ef43014 ip 08123478 sp bfeb3958 error 6 in Xorg[8048000+19d000]
[fglrx] GART Table is not in FRAME_BUFFER range 
[fglrx] Firegl kernel thread PID: 3698
[fglrx] Gart USWC size:783 M.
[fglrx] Gart cacheable size:60 M.
[fglrx] Reserved FB block: Shared offset:0, size:1000000 
[fglrx] Reserved FB block: Unshared offset:fffc000, size:4000

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