AMD's opensource lies exposed

[glxextxexlg]

It took them a long time, because the Gallium stack and KMS were not ready yet, and this is clearly not Marek's or Corbin's fault.

I never implied that its marek's or corbin's fault and I feel utmost respect for their efforts. Its amd's fault as the manufacturer. Amd didn't help X and mesa developers to implement the gallium3d API and KMS+DRI2. Ironically it was a rival, intel who helped them! My r580 uses the intel glsl bits as it renders 3d applications hohoho. The same thing happens with the mesa OpenGL 3x/4x bits right now.

[pingufunkybeat]

Intel does do more for the open source stack than AMD, and I respect them for it.

How much did Nvidia help with Mesa and kernel DRM? How much did they help the nouveau hackers?

Banging on AMD while praising Nvidia is hypocritical.

All of us would be happier if AMD hired another 3-4 full-time developers and the drivers progressed faster. But the facts still are that:

- they have opened specs and continue to do so
- they employ two full-time OSS developers who contribute to the kernel and Mesa, as well as the X drivers
- all of their GPUs (save a couple of the most advanced ones from the HD6xxx line) are supported by OSS drivers and provide a good desktop experience. Neither Intel nor Nvidia support all of their chips under Linux!

That's very commendable and worthy of support, in my opinion. So far, I'm happy with the development in the last two years.

Now would be a great time to throw some cash into Mesa and video decoding, and I'd be very glad if AMD did this. However, they didn't pledge to do this.

[darkbasic]

- they employ two full-time OSS developers who contribute to the kernel and Mesa, as well as the X drivers

Three. They were hiring few times ago, but I still don't know who's the third developer.

[deanjo]

Note: not to be taken seriously. Since this thread is pretty much doomed anyway, here's my contribution to the flame war:

What??? What kind of super-duper-nuclear-fusion-powered 17" monitor was that?? I have an Eizo T960 21" CRT that tops at 2048x1536@75Hz (default modes only) and everything is just so small at that resolution that I would never even consider using it a whole day. Oh, and it has a maximum 115KHz horizontal scan frequency, which is pretty high when it comes to CRTs, and can "only" go up to 92Hz on 1600x1200 (the resolution I use). The monitor you describe would need at least a 125KHz Horizontal scan frequency, which wouldn't make much sense on a 17" monitor. And, the only way to get those kind of high resolution video modes would be to create them in X.org or with xrandr.

Ya the bullshit-o-meter went to 11 (on a scale of 1-10) on that one.

[glisse]

Good question. AMD is lying because they will never deliver opensource OGL3x/4x and video acceleration support to their customers. AMD dropped support for r300 - r500 hardware in early 2009 and they left development of the open drivers to independent developers like marek olsak and corbin simpson. It took them a very long time and tremendous amounts of unpaid hard work to make r300g an OK driver and it still is not ready for mainstream use.
And yes they will drop support for their "older" r600/r700 hardware. And people won't be able to play new games released for linux (OilRush etc) that use OGL3x/4x, or do the magic things available with the html5 WebM, WebGL for a very long time with linux. Because r600-700 development will be shifted to independent devs and that hardware is orders of magnitude more complex than r300-r500 hardware.

The result is people saying:

FUD is so lovely As far as i can tell (and i would like to think that given i wrote r600g i kind of know what i am talking about) there is all the information to write a GL3/4 driver for r6xx,r7xx,evergreen (and their derivative such as fusion), the informations is either in the doc or in the code source (register file), and if anything is missing it's not much more than very easy to guess value such as :
textureformat_RGB888 0x10
textureformat_ARGB8888 0x14
Damm what could be the 0x11,x012,0x13 texture format ? compressed ? floating point ? ...

That being said AMD never committed to do an open source driver, they committed to support the community to do an open source driver and they have done much more than just giving documentations...

[Panix]

This says it all:

http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature

AMD doesn't support it. They just pass it over to the community so if enough ppl take initiative, you might get progress in 5 yrs instead of 10.

OSS is a good concept and is an ideal but for wanting things to work, you read this a zillion times so it doesn't matter if you have a card or not. If you read this in every distro forum there is and why they pick the evil Nvidia card.... video and 3D are things a lot of people don't want to sacrifice for waiting for features.

I don't think this is FUD. Not sure why that is the accusation. If it was true OSS, then why take years to get anything working?

[glisse]

I don't think this is FUD. Not sure why that is the accusation. If it was true OSS, then why take years to get anything working?

This is a FUD because he said that there will never be a GL3/4 opensource driver, while there is already all the informations to achieve such things.

[pingufunkybeat]

HD6000 got support 3 months after being released.

That's not "years to get anything working".

The rest (optimisations, OpenGL3+) is dependent on the development of the Mesa infrastructure, and that's not only AMD's responsibility, but also shared with Intel, VMWare, the distros, and volunteers.

[Panix]

HD6000 got support 3 months after being released.

That's not "years to get anything working".

The rest (optimisations, OpenGL3+) is dependent on the development of the Mesa infrastructure, and that's not only AMD's responsibility, but also shared with Intel, VMWare, the distros, and volunteers.

"HD6000 got support 3 months after being released."
But, what does that *mean?*

As for the other statements, I think it's dependent on a lot of variables. All the stars have to align? I guess my point is there must be some reason there's issues or problems with both kinds of drivers. Even if it's 'open', there's a lot of dots that have to be joined.

[D0pamine]

One thing is for certain - whining and bitching gets nothing working!