ATi Support on infinityOS

[darkphoenix22]

There is no 3D support on the HD 4000 and HD 5000 series (actually I believe the Radeon drivers don't fully support the HD 5000 series yet) though with the Radeon drivers. I later tested a HD 4550 from another friend and XMBC was as slow as molasses due to there being no 3D acceleration.

Having a hybrid driver as you proposed would allow for ATi to keep the 3D support in the Radeon drivers in lock-step with flgrx.

[bridgman]

Huh ? 3D support on HD4000 is the same as HD2000 and HD3000.

Either your friend didn't have sufficiently new drivers or they weren't configured correctly, or there is something specific to XBMC that doesn't work well with any of the recent open source drivers.

[bridgman]

s/friend/system/ (I missed that it was your system but your friend's card)

[darkphoenix22]

Note: I did only test the drivers available in Karmic. This may have changed in the latest git builds. I wanted to approximate what my users would experience.

Perhaps, ATi should make their drivers (both the Radeon drivers and flgrx) available on a Launchpad PPA to make it easier for users to update to the latest versions of their drivers. Nvidia already does so with the Nvidia Vdpau Team PPA. This way my users can install and update their drivers directly through the Jockey/Hardware Drivers interface.

I actually copy the latest versions of the ALSA, Nvidia VDPAU drivers and network-manager to by "testing-drivers" repo so my users can have the latest versions of all their drivers, and have them auto-update when needed, no need for compiling. I would be more than happy to add the ATi drivers (both Radeon and flgrx) to this list if ATi put the latest drivers up on Launchpad.

[bridgman]

BTW check your dmesg output for errors from the drm; you may be missing a microcode image, probably the _rlc file.

[bridgman]

Note: I did only test the drivers available in Karmic. This may have changed in the latest git builds. I wanted to approximate what my users would experience.

Ahh, that explains it - Karmic didn't have 3D support for HD2xxx and higher. Lucid does.

The drivers are open source so distros can (and do) roll their own updates. The proprietary driver installer includes package builder scripts for a number of different distros.

[Armin]

There is no 3D support on the HD 4000 and HD 5000 series (actually I believe the Radeon drivers don't fully support the HD 5000 series yet) though with the Radeon drivers.

I have a "ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650" (r600) which uses the same driver as a HD 4000 (r700) and I had already last December a nice working 3D desktop (Kwin effects) with the open source driver. Even though the 3D performance was kind of poor with the software (Paraview, StarCD) I used for testing.

The HD 5000 is basically still left without any acceleration (2D/3D) on the OS side, but the fglrx should work.

[Armin]

Edit: My OS driver tests were always with git-builds (kernel, libdrm, radeon, mesa) on Archlinux 64bit! I would suggest u at least use radeon and mesa git-build. There should be an easy way to do that in Ubuntu as well (without compiling).

[darkphoenix22]

*Aside* I just realized I misspelt fglrx a million time as flgrx

After a bit of thought, it can't be a problem with Mesa that is causing my problems with XBMC, as XBMC works fine on my laptop with Intel graphics.

One of the main features my distribution is a new release system. I called it a semi-rolling release system.

What this entails is that infinityOS will automatically notify you
when any application you have installed on infinityOS (anything from
Firefox, to Deluge, to Pidgin, to SMPlayer) has been updated by its
developers.*From that point its a matter of three clicks to make every
application installed on infinityOS up-to-date. No more going to
websites to download the latest version to fix bugs or get new
features. infinityOS does it all for you.

In this process, however, the core operating system (meaning the
kernel, the desktop*environment, and the core drivers) will only have
one major update every six months, apart from security updates. This
release system allows for your Linux system to be completely stable and
error-free while the things you actually use are kept completely
up-to-date.

My goal is to push package maintaining and testing for end-user
applications back to the developers themselves. When they make a new
release on their PPA and notify me, I will push it to either my
"testing" or "unstable" repositories, depending on the results of my
testing and the packages it depends on. After a period of time the
package will be then moved to stable.

Effectively, I want to rid Linux of the problems faced when users are still using old, buggy versions of software that are included with the distributions. This will help you guys out (and all Linux devs really) as you won't have to still answer questions related to bugs long since fixed in the latest versions of your drivers/software.

[darkphoenix22]

Sorry about the copy and paste job, the editing limit on this forum is driving me nuts.