Here come the excuses. Since, there's a half dozen 'good' excuses why the FOSS support is slow, what's the excuse why closed drivers aren't available? Or should I say, why not released? I think it's because ATI/AMD doesn't have basic Linux support and are Windows-centric. Just like Nvidia.
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AMD Releases Radeon HD 6000 Series Open-Source Support
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Originally posted by Panix View PostI think it's because ATI/AMD doesn't have basic Linux support and are Windows-centric. Just like Nvidia.
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The cards launched in October and we already have initial open-source support. Awesome! The gap is getting smaller and smaller.
And yet Nvidia usually has support in the drivers for future products well in advance of the products release. Fermi for example was supported in their drivers quite a few months before their release.
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Originally posted by BlackStar View PostThe cards launched in October and we already have initial open-source support. Awesome! The gap is getting smaller and smaller.
It used to be 3 years after the hardware release, now it's 3 months.
With Nvidia, we are still waiting for a release 10 years later, and they still have no intentions of releasing anything.
Originally posted by deanjoAnd yet Nvidia usually has support in the drivers for future products well in advance of the products release. Fermi for example was supported in their drivers quite a few months before their release.
Yeah, right.
Compare Nvidia stuff to Catalyst, not to the open, documented drivers based on X.org and Mesa, with community involvement.
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Originally posted by Panix View PostHere come the excuses. Since, there's a half dozen 'good' excuses why the FOSS support is slow, what's the excuse why closed drivers aren't available? Or should I say, why not released? I think it's because ATI/AMD doesn't have basic Linux support and are Windows-centric. Just like Nvidia.
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Originally posted by pingufunkybeat View PostYeah. Two and a half months is really not that bad, and the gap is closing rapidly. That's really great progress, even if the usual whiners will bitch about anything.
I don't know the ins and outs of all the pieces of code that support the drivers. However it's obvious the logistics of releasing drivers is not optimal. The code to support the 6000 cards is done. Yay! But the user won't see this work for another 9 months. Boo. That's a huge amount of latency. This is a problem for at least a couple reasons:
1. The user is left in the dark without full driver support (obviously).
2. But more concerning, the developer who wrote the original code is left in the dark because bug reports won't show up until the distros ship the driver. By then the developer could have moved on to other projects or lost interest.
Improving the speed of getting the latest open source drivers in the hands of users is a obviously a win-win.
I wish I understoodd why open source driver support has to affect so many different parts of code (kernel, mesa, drm, etc) when the proprietary one doesn't need to. Presumably it's because the closed one reimplements all that stuff?
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Originally posted by leif81 View PostBut the user won't see this work for another 9 months.
I wish I understoodd why open source driver support has to affect so many different parts of code (kernel, mesa, drm, etc) when the proprietary one doesn't need to. Presumably it's because the closed one reimplements all that stuff?
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The advantage of tracking and working the upstream projects (kernel, mesa, X) is that your code will always work with the latest releases. The disadvantage is that it will need some work and there will be some lag to port to older releases. If you track older releases, there will be work and lag required to support newer ones.
The open drivers track the latest releases. They catch a lot of grief for not supporting older releases immediately, although most distros do a good job of backporting the necessary changes.
The closed drivers target current releases, but that means there is usually a lag catching up the support for the latest kernel/X releases. They catch grief for not supporting the latest kernel/X releases immediately.
Neither option is perfect.
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