Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

ATI R600 Gallium3D Driver Continues Advancing

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • #31
    Originally posted by monraaf View Post
    I don't think Ubuntu 10.10 will have Evergreen acceleration by default. They do have a recent mesa 7.9 git snapshot, but are missing the drm lockup patches and the required ddx version.
    They would probably best be advised to ship it in a package labeled "experimental", like Fedora 12 did previously for early 600/700 3D.... mesa-dri-drivers-experimental. Generally, forcing a user to manually install a package labelled like this to enable 3D support makes it pretty clear that it is there, but buggy.

    ... And another one named gallium-superexperimental-caution

    Comment


    • #32
      Yes, but the point I'm trying to make is that any performance advantages of 600g will appear over time as a consequence of the code being a "nicer place to work", rather than appearing immediately as a consequence of "being Gallium".
      Test signature

      Comment


      • #33
        Originally posted by bridgman View Post
        rather than appearing immediately as a consequence of "being Gallium".
        OMG

        [stupid 10 characters limit]
        ## VGA ##
        AMD: X1950XTX, HD3870, HD5870
        Intel: GMA45, HD3000 (Core i5 2500K)

        Comment


        • #35
          Originally posted by Qaridarium
          because more devs bring more speed.
          Or more bugs....

          Comment


          • #36
            Originally posted by droidhacker View Post
            Or more bugs....
            So said the embodiment of optimism...

            Comment


            • #37
              Strictly speaking, more devs will bring more code *and* more bugs, but since most new devs learn the driver code by *fixing* bugs it should all work out
              Test signature

              Comment


              • #38
                I think that there are two things to think about regarding bugs;

                1) at a constant rate of errors per lines of code, doubling the code means doubling the bugs.
                2) as the complexity increases, the rate of bugs tends to rise as well since it becomes exponentially more difficult to analyse the code in the "big picture".... especially when bad development methodologies are used, as is likely more common in closed source code.

                Comment


                • #39
                  It's a pretty safe bet that proprietary driver development is using more advanced processes than open source these days. I think you'll find that the defect density ((latent + known defects) / LOC) is actually lower for closed source drivers than for open source drivers. I can't go into a lot of details but you might be surprised how far proprietary driver development has come in the last decade.

                  I agree with the exponential rise in complexity as the driver grows though... that is a problem for open and closed drivers. The open source stack for ATI radeon GPUs has gone from ~50 KSLOC to over 250 KSLOC in the last couple of years (not counting close to 1,000 KSLOC of common Mesa code) and there is probably still some growing to do. By way of comparison, the proprietary drivers are well over 10,000 KSLOC.

                  That said, the main challenges with closed source Linux drivers are more related to "big expectations vs. small market share/resources" and "large code size due to code sharing across multiple OSes" than to development process.

                  Open source has one big advantage over closed source development, however, which is that users can bisect regression failures. We really need to get something similar implemented in the closed source world (the problem is sanitizing out future product info, not tools/process).

                  I think this post added 5 or 6 to my post count... maybe 7 now.
                  Test signature

                  Comment


                  • #40
                    Actually, OSS has another advantage

                    Originally posted by bridgman View Post
                    Open source has one big advantage over closed source development, however, which is that users can bisect regression failures.
                    With OSS, you don't get exchanges like this:
                    User: Hi, The fglrx driver is having trouble running on my laptop.
                    AMD: Did you buy a discrete graphics card from us?
                    User: No, it's a laptop with an integrated AMD graphics chip.
                    AMD: Then go talk to your laptop vendor instead. Goodbye.

                    Comment

                    Working...
                    X