AMD Catalyst 9.11 For Linux Released

[jrch2k8]

don't blame AMD. Blame Redhat/Fedora for fucking up X.

You are complaining about exa? Why? Featuritis? Why do you need 'exa'? Really?

Get an ubroken X and 2d is fast. Exa wouldn't make anything better,

well, i dont wanna be rude here but well you sound like someone new to linux . why EXA/UXA?? well XAA have like 20 years around or more to begin with. XAA wasn't designed to work with modern technologies or ideas like composite, XRender advanced stuff, etc. beside EXA/UXA code per se is needed for future technologies like SVG acceleration within X for example. XAA do their job for 20ish years but now is a tired mammut asking for rest. and well if you ask me even the current Xlib code need to be rewrited too, if you look at the xlib code your eyes will bleed. why EXA/UXA? cuz we need it to keep enhancing the desktop experience in the years to come, that's why.

about redhat/fedora, well true i dont like those distro either but i have to admit they have some great ideas and they are a real important human capital to the community. and well, redhat enterprise is very old software so you still can use XAA and your ugly gnome 2.0 and stuff + they provide support too, mmm hey even centos is outhere for enterprise.

why blame AMD? because nvidia is out there. this means nvidia beside for some problems from time to time provide me a real nice linux user experience even using git bleeding edge code (xserver 1.7 support, kernel 2.6.33, VDPAU, OpenCL, etc, etc). AMD on the other hand well not even close.

so if amd give their hardware for free, well i never ever even complain about a messy driver, but when you have to choose like me gtx 295 vs quadfire (pretty much same price in amazon) aka 650$ + 280$ for the 1200w PSU, well is not pretty to find out the poor state of linux support in fglrx + the total absence of goodies like openCL, UVD2, etc. you get mad like anyone in this forum cuz neither amd or amazon make a fat warning or a discount, something if you are going to use linux receive this 150$ rebate cuz the drivers are very far from from anything else or warning only partial/experimental linux support, that way well at least we choose this.

now AMD have their share of good things too like the beatifully OSS driver cooking out there, so far is getting good enough to keep me from selling this card and get an nvidia one and to completly forget about the existance of something named fglrx forever. give me full mesa opengl 2 support and we are done cuz 2d/xv/exa/composite is just beatiful really outstanding and crossfire can wait

[RealNC]

don't blame AMD. Blame Redhat/Fedora for fucking up X.

This is going on like, forever. Always the same argument. They didn't "break" X, they actually fixed it. There was an ugly visual glitch. If that fix happens to break a binary-only driver like fglrx, then the vendor of that driver should try to either provide a better fix for this or work around it. The recent attempt for a better fix (xserver-xorg-backclear.patch) is not working always.

Obviously, the X devs cannot fix the blob themselves, or even look in it to see what's wrong, they only have access to source code of drivers that are part of X.

Simply saying "they fucked up X" is just stupid. There was a bug that needed to be closed.

[mirv]

I don't quite follow how anyone looking for a high end linux 3D workstation would want to buy ati.

I do have an IBM T60P which does fit that profile and did scientific visualization on it (with a lot of polygons) and even the then brand new radeon r500 dri was a lot faster than fglrx, which was plainly unusable.

Faster, but with better pixel precision, and higher stability (from a workstation perspective)? Also, define "unusable" - perhaps even define what you consider scientific visualisation (your own code? or another specific application used?). Lots of polygons isn't exactly a useful description.
Or were you simply trying to make yourself look good by stating that you have a firegl card in something?

[energyman]

Fedora 10 is so old that it is within days of becoming completely obsolete. And 9.11 is brand spankin' new... In other words, this "backclear patch" has been 'out there' for a long, long time...

Why is fglrx consistently behind the curve when it comes to X support? It doesn't even do EXA yet, either!

Exactly who is fglrx's "main customer", when so many desktop Linux users are scratching their eyes out in frustration at its lack-lustre performance?

don't blame AMD. Blame Redhat/Fedora for fucking up X.

You are complaining about exa? Why? Featuritis? Why do you need 'exa'? Really?

Get an ubroken X and 2d is fast. Exa wouldn't make anything better,

[barkas]

I don't quite follow how anyone looking for a high end linux 3D workstation would want to buy ati.

I do have an IBM T60P which does fit that profile and did scientific visualization on it (with a lot of polygons) and even the then brand new radeon r500 dri was a lot faster than fglrx, which was plainly unusable.

[bridgman]

I believe the backclear patch is pretty recent. It's the "no backfill" patch that has been around for years and was a standard part of most distros until it was taken out of the X server this year.

The "main customer" for fglrx is still the 3D workstation market, which tends to run on enterprise distro releases with older X servers without the font caching fixes which make EXA useable. They would generally not be able to make use of EXA and would not see the unminimizing delay anyways, since it only occurs when a compositor is enabled.

[chrisr]

Except that I am running Fedora 10

just unbreak your xorg-server with the backclear patch. 2d will be very pleasant afterwards.

Fedora 10 is so old that it is within days of becoming completely obsolete. And 9.11 is brand spankin' new... In other words, this "backclear patch" has been 'out there' for a long, long time...

Why is fglrx consistently behind the curve when it comes to X support? It doesn't even do EXA yet, either!

Exactly who is fglrx's "main customer", when so many desktop Linux users are scratching their eyes out in frustration at its lack-lustre performance?

[mtippett]

Most of the improvements have come when the Wine devs take the problem from "Windows app ABC does something bad" to "we expect this OpenGL call to do X but it actually does Y" -- then we either respond with "calling that way has undefined results in the OpenGL spec, but if you called <this> way it would work on everyones HW" or "that's not right, we'll fix it".

Extending John's comments somewhat.

Most wine devs use NV. So the open-to-interpretation parts of the spec opt for the NV behaviour. This paired with DX to OGL being a black art itself results in something akin to...

wine+game have an affinity to NV. It might be that the game doesn't work under ATI, but that is most likely that it has never been tested against ATI by a dev, so the NV behaviour becomes the defacto path for wine. People hold then look at the NV+wine pairing as working perfectly, and ati+wine as being broken. The only variable changing is the vendor, so it is possibly a valid (albiet vastly simplified, nearly naive) assumption to make.

The reality is that the NV bugs and the wine bugs become mutually compatible and fit together nicely. The ATI bugs and the wine bugs simply don't play nicely together. A wine bug may be present because of a behaviour with NV, where without that behaviour wine is actually misbehaving and the ATI driver is actually correct.

This doesn't make the pairing any easier to handle, nv+wine just works better. But until the wine devs have a representative mix of hw to the market, it will be a slow, painful path to stability.

Matt

[jrch2k8]

can someone help me here, i got 9.10 and well got all working not stable ofc but manageable. but with 9.11 well kde4 composite is broken (wierd ja )but the black texture corruption is gone in 2d it seems for now.

here is my pctested with default clocks too ofc and with windows 7 x64. is not a hardware issue)
athlon x4 620 cache unlocked @ 3.7ghz
mobo msi gd-70 ht @ 2.250 ghz
Radeon hd 4850x2 x 2 aka quadfire (tried with 1 card too ofc)
kubuntu 9.10 x64 fresh install + update + nothing custom or ppa all is distro repos

so the thousand dollars question how the $@$@$@ i debug or fix it??

and plz focus more devs in oss driver to get at least the same lvl of 3d than intel driver, so i can switch and lets this nigthmare behind, i dont wanna be rude but when you have to actually works with a pc. this erratic behaviour is a liver killer, lol 9.9 xv broken + hard lockups. 9.10 3d semi stable, 2d really corrupted but composite fixed it, 9.11 2d no corruption 3d broken. really some QA wont harm anyone, ok maybe is my fault for do the crazy stuff of buying an X2 card and it works fine in x1 cards, i can live with that cuz 1 4850 is powerful enough to work but in that case at least force disable the second chip by default and enabled it only when someone actually tested it in next releases. for now ill try google, disable all that aticonfig let me, and ofc gdb my 3d apps once again to try to trace where is the broken stuff, and make a script that do this automatic so less trauma every "release"

UPDATE:
after more testing and disabled everything i could, well stream is broken, flash is broken(especially 10.1 using stream but ok is beta but well in nvidia/intel works just fine)(flash suddenly stop rendering and hang the browser but the audio keeps playing), crossfire is broken aka every 3d app using crossfire after few mins black screen then deathlock, i suspect kernel panic but well i cant see it cuz everything including keyboards just dies, composite like i said before keep broken even without crossfire, xv have less tearing but compared to nvidia/intel is very noticeable (maybe im just too picky here, not the big deal), 2d works fine for first time since i remember, wine is ***working*** first time since i remember but ofc it hangs few mins later if i dare to activate crossfire, so no hardcore games in wine for now

[bridgman]

@bridgman

Got it.
Will you care of bugs with a lot of wine fixme's and console spawn?
Or is there a specific way to get debugging informations?

Most of the improvements have come when the Wine devs take the problem from "Windows app ABC does something bad" to "we expect this OpenGL call to do X but it actually does Y" -- then we either respond with "calling that way has undefined results in the OpenGL spec, but if you called <this> way it would work on everyones HW" or "that's not right, we'll fix it".