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AMD's Linux Team Takes Another Blow

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  • AMD's Linux Team Takes Another Blow

    Phoronix: AMD's Linux Team Takes Another Blow

    The ATI/AMD Catalyst Linux driver has improved vastly over the years with the switch to their new architecture back in 2007 and hitting many milestones since that point with reaching a performance and near-feature parity with their Windows Catalyst driver thanks to a largely shared code-base. The Catalyst Linux driver is now largely on-par with the AMD Windows driver (except with areas like XvBA for video acceleration), but today AMD's Linux team is facing a new loss...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    Less devs in fglrx = more money in oss?

    Please?

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    • #3
      IIRC, while ATI/AMD has made great strides in supporting Linux, they are still behind in supporting the latest X server. Which means no drivers for new cards on new distro releases.
      Which means I bought nvidia again

      Comment


      • #4
        These must be good days to be a Linux engineer. Android is growing enormously and I expect Chrome to be significant. Of course a lot of the work will be apps development, which is rather platform independent. But Google will need to keep hiring Linux gurus to keep building these OS's.

        Anyways, best luck to everyone involved (both the AMD/ATI team and Piranavan, for helping me use ATI's hardware in Linux

        Many folks are newer user, but I started using Linux circa 1995. A vast majority of hardware had very limited, if any support under Linux.I'll much rather see Open Source support (for many reasons), but any support is infinitely better than no support.

        Thanks guys!

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        • #5
          It never hurts to keep an eye on the "careers" pages at amd.com either. Maybe look at reqs 13400, 13544, and 13863 as a start.
          Test signature

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          • #6
            Originally posted by bug77 View Post
            IIRC, while ATI/AMD has made great strides in supporting Linux, they are still behind in supporting the latest X server. Which means no drivers for new cards on new distro releases.
            Which means I bought nvidia again
            xorg-server 1.9 is supported with Catalyst 10.10+.

            Using a 4850 with the FOSS driver for a long time, I switched to the binary blob as I'm learning a bit of OpenGL 3+.
            (Actually, I blindly bought the 5th Ed. of the "OpenGL Super Bible", which does not cover the fixed function part anymore. Stupid, I wasn't aware of that - so, my bad... )
            I still would prefer a FOSS driver but honestly: the blob is really doing an excellent job here which I didn't expected.
            Seems like lots of people are to be negatively biased towards the binary, in a way that it doesn't deserve (anymore).
            I don't use XVBA, so that's not an issue for me. Multi Screen with RandR 1.3 working flawless, 2D feels snappy with no artifacts and it's really stable.

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            • #7
              It was just one year ago that AMD lost its core Linux engineering manager, Matthew Tippett, who had been with ATI Technologies for the better part of a decade and had built up the ATI Linux driver team that went on to make all of the major improvements while Matthew introduced many changes along the way.
              Please, just break this into two sentences. It's really hard to parse as-is.

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              • #8
                It's funny how I had a better opinion of phoronix about fglrx when it said how bad it was and now I have a much worse opinion when it says how good it is now.
                First, there is this issue: http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26645
                Very, very annoying.

                Then with catalyst 10.11 they made me switch to the Open Source driver again:
                • Warcraft 3 occassionally just freezes. I have encountered about 6 of this freezes. One time it completely blocked the keyboard and I had to ssh into the pc to kill wine. The other times I could alt+tab and kill it directly. I believe this isn't even openGL 2!
                • Half Life 2 freezes on some different points in the game when you look in the wrong direction in the wrong angle.
                  Then I got to one point where I couldn't go further because it froze every time.

                Here is a little video: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13721560/hl2-3.mkv (FPS was very good actually, it's just the video recording). I tried with several different settings in the amdcccle and with a fresh default config.
                I then put in a geforce 8800gt. With that card and the exactly same wine configuration it run flawlessly. Unfortunately the memory of this card seems to be broken because sometimes single characters on the console (even on bios screen) are colored and after some time of running applications that I think need much video ram the pc freezes and leaves me with a broken framebuffer etc.

                Originally posted by bug77 View Post
                IIRC, while ATI/AMD has made great strides in supporting Linux, they are still behind in supporting the latest X server. Which means no drivers for new cards on new distro releases.
                Which means I bought nvidia again
                I ran with xorg 1.9 and 2.6.36. What is latest if not that?
                On the other hand maybe it doesn't work properly because I don't use legacy software.

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by mendieta View Post
                  These must be good days to be a Linux engineer.
                  In truth, it is... It's keeping me employed and able to pick up new contracts right at the moment...

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by Svartalf View Post
                    In truth, it is... It's keeping me employed and able to pick up new contracts right at the moment...
                    Uh oh. I guess that's got to mean something.

                    But I guess in AMDs case after 7 years maybe they wanted to do something different. And I guess somebody else will follow into their empty position.
                    Stop TCPA, stupid software patents and corrupt politicians!

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