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AMD Releases Radeon HD 6000 Series Open-Source Support

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  • #21
    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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    • #22
      The cards launched in October and we already have initial open-source support. Awesome! The gap is getting smaller and smaller.

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      • #23
        Originally posted by Panix View Post
        I think it's because ATI/AMD doesn't have basic Linux support and are Windows-centric. Just like Nvidia.
        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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        • #24
          The cards launched in October and we already have initial open-source support. Awesome! The gap is getting smaller and smaller.
          My thoughts exactly. It even seems that Fusion APU will be supported on day 1, so that really seem to be improving a lot.

          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.
          Well, the cards were one year late, so the devs had plenty of time to write the drivers. :-)

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          • #25
            Originally posted by BlackStar View Post
            The cards launched in October and we already have initial open-source support. Awesome! The gap is getting smaller and smaller.
            Yeah. 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.

            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 deanjo
            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.
            In their open source drivers?

            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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            • #26
              Originally posted by Panix View Post
              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.
              Yes, I would say almost all PC hardware vendors are Windows-centric. Windows is >90% of the PC market and it gets a commensurate amount of resources. fglrx/nvidia can piggyback on that windows code which is why they get support fairly quickly, but Linux is still a small percentage of the PC market.

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              • #27
                Originally posted by pingufunkybeat View Post
                Yeah. 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.
                No one is whining here. It's a discussion about improving the pace of development. Everyone involved in the open source driver development process (developers, legal, bug submitters, etc) deserve a hardy pat on the back for their efforts. However things *can* keep getting better. We're seeing things get better on a daily basis. So it's fair and also desirable to keep encouraging things get better. It's even productive to have these discussions because who knows maybe the next driver contributor will come from Phoronix because they have been inspired to help once they realized the problems.

                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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                • #28
                  Originally posted by leif81 View Post
                  But the user won't see this work for another 9 months.
                  Surely Ubuntu/Fedora plan to backport this for their spring releases, right? Or are they really going to make us wait?

                  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?
                  It does. The difference is that the OSS drivers include the code in the upstream projects, while the proprietary drivers just copy binary libs onto your system that plug into the kernel/X/etc. The OSS drivers could do the same thing, but it would require more manpower since you couldn't rely on the upstream projects doing any maintenance.

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                  • #29
                    Will the Cayman support be added to r600g, or will it require a new driver? rCaymang? Doesn't have quite the same ring to it...

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                    • #30
                      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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