Catalyst 10.2 is out

[albatorsk]

Seriously, what's going in at AMD?

We've been told that the reason the drivers lag behind is because of the three month development process, where one of the months is for testing before release. For example, if a new version of Xorg is released that's incompatible with fglrx, it'll take at least 2 months for a fixed driver to reach the end users, or somesuch.

What happened during that one month of testing 10.1, when official support for Ubuntu 9.10 was touted as a new feature? They never tested actually building packages for Ubuntu 9.10 before green lighting it?

And this release, 10.2; Compiz broke. How did that slip through testing? Imagine if Catalyst 10.2 for Windows Vista/7 was released with broken support for Aero Glass. Just think about it. Would never happen.

What are the testers doing, and how can I get a job at AMD as one? Because they seem to have a pretty easy job NOT DOING THEIR JOB.

[bridgman]

I've posted on this before, but what the heck...

The Cat 10.1 release was originally going to use a Dec 18 built, however that build failed testing relatively late in the cycle. Testing was restarted on the previous (Dec 11) build, and the release passed (becoming the 10.1 Catalyst release), but the latest version of the third party packaging scripts did not get back-ported to the new build.

AFAIK the QA testing is primarily done using the native installer rather than the distro-specific packaging scripts.

I don't have much info on Cat 10.2 yet, specifically not sure whether the compositing issue reproduces in house. It may be that test time was split between old and new 2D acceleration code, not sure.

[Kano]

@bridgeman

can you force xbmc glsl code in the test suite before release? As this might be from the shared code part it could affect win too...

[Odur]

Well, this release was positive for me. The developers have finally fixed the one bug I hated most.
I can finally use the "switch user" button in KDE without the computer locking up!

[tmpdir]

Since the drivers suck (duh), but they will be awesome in the future, you can use this service to get the next decade's Catalyst Driver's (will probably support X.Org 1.7 too.)

Even time travel fails, murphy already made this sure by limiting the period of support for our cards. ariving on the exact moment your drivers works while your card still is supported is just to difficult.

[NeoBrain]

Well, this release was positive for me. The developers have finally fixed the one bug I hated most.
I can finally use the "switch user" button in KDE without the computer locking up!

Yeah, it's awesome. User switching works again, as well as S2RAM WITH compositing enabled. Still a bit buggy, esp. with D2D, but at least stuff is working now
Now, too bad I don't make any use of user switching and S2RAM anymore, because they had been broken that long with fglrx...

[blackshard]

I get flawless installation of 10.2.
Direct2D without compiz is slow, it looks like there's no hardware blitting at all. Also compiz can't be enabled because draws all gray windows and is unusable (happens also with 9.12 and 10.1, but not with 9.10), but actually OpenGL acceleration works as usual.

[blankname]

I've found some changelog

This release of ATI Catalyst? for Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems:

* openSUSE 11.2 production support

http://blogs.amd.com/play/2010/02/17/ati-catalyst%E2%84%A2-10-2-driver-%E2%80%93-what%E2%80%99s-new/

[mega_mike]

Seriously, what's going in at AMD?

We've been told that the reason the drivers lag behind is because of the three month development process, where one of the months is for testing before release. For example, if a new version of Xorg is released that's incompatible with fglrx, it'll take at least 2 months for a fixed driver to reach the end users, or somesuch.

What happened during that one month of testing 10.1, when official support for Ubuntu 9.10 was touted as a new feature? They never tested actually building packages for Ubuntu 9.10 before green lighting it?

And this release, 10.2; Compiz broke. How did that slip through testing? Imagine if Catalyst 10.2 for Windows Vista/7 was released with broken support for Aero Glass. Just think about it. Would never happen.

What are the testers doing, and how can I get a job at AMD as one? Because they seem to have a pretty easy job NOT DOING THEIR JOB.

I have an integrated HD 4200 and I had to go back to version 10.1 from 10.2. Having Compiz break consistently was a deal breaker, sorry ATI. If there are Linux testers you guys absolutely must test with the latest Ubuntu x86/64 release.

At this point I believe ATI doesn't have testers for Linux. I work for a small software company as a team lead/developer and we do not have a q/a team....but we make it up for it by being very responsive to any software issue (i.e. we acknowledge it and fix it asap).

[dgrafenhofer]

I've found some changelog
http://blogs.amd.com/play/2010/02/17...E2%80%99s-new/

Ahh, this is why it works just perfect for me