AMD's Linux Team Takes Another Blow

[droidhacker]

I think we decided that agd5f and a couple of other people would interview candidates for the open source position. I don't remember if I put myself on the list or not.

I am not involved with the other two positions.

Hmm.. maybe I should apply. I live about 5 minutes away. And Alex already knows that I'm not a *complete* fool...

[Decatf]

That position should fill fast. There is no shortage of techno geeks in the GTA.

[bridgman]

I think we decided that agd5f and a couple of other people would interview candidates for the open source position. I don't remember if I put myself on the list or not.

I am not involved with the other two positions.

[droidhacker]

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.

If one were to apply, are you the guy who makes the decision?

[Adarion]

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.

[Svartalf]

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...

[ChrisXY]

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.

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.

[mattst88]

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.

[entropy]

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.

[bridgman]

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.