Radeon Evergreen HDMI Audio Code Is Still M.I.A.

[DaemonFC]

The easiest AMD could do is to be like nVidia. Source? No. Specs? No. Buzz off and go away. All you get a blob and the license says "No Reverse Engineering. Customer may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the SOFTWARE, nor attempt in any other manner to obtain the source code."

Is AMD completely and utterly committed to making open source drivers? Hell no, for one thing they'd like to stay in business. Sure, they could just post the full source of their proprietary driver here, they'd only get sued to oblivion and have all their graphics cards blacklisted. So because they're not doing that, they're not trying. *rollseyes*

You are starting your raving at the completely wrong end. AMD doesn't have any benefit from DRM, if it all magically went away they'd sell graphics cards like before. Maybe even more. It starts with Hollywood, they want DRM. They pressure Microsoft and say either you accept DRM, or Windows won't play BluRays - only standalone players. So Microsoft turns around and says okay, to get the Windows logo the graphics card must implement DRM. And if you want to deliver to 95% of the market, actually 99% because it's same with Apple then you say yes. What do you want from AMD, corporate suicide? Make Hollywood stop demanding DRM, then AMD will stop delivering it. If not, Hollywood will go to someone who will.

Item 1: It's obvious that Red Hat's lawyers don't think those EULA sections are enforceable. If they are, then WINE is also illegal. Though courts in the US have traditionally sided with the victim of the lawsuit when this kind of nonsense ends up in the court system, provided that they do their reverse engineering like Nouveau and WINE do.

It's surprising that Nouveau in many cases is on par with AMD with no help from Nvidia. Obviously the documentation and occasional skeleton driver code contribution by AMD is helpful, but there would probably be a sister project to Nouveau if AMD decided to close up the Radeon specs and go full on evil again.

Item 2: Of course AMD isn't doing this because it's right. They're doing it because FGLRX is an unholy mess and they want free labor to make a driver they can port to Windows. Phoronix has had several articles about the same driver code being made proprietary to go into Windows CE. Free labor is a nice thing to have. The Catalyst mess is probably far from optimal for real Windows, much less the embedded thing calling itself that. (It will also be nice to have if they want their hardware to go into tablets.) Other than FGLRX being utter crap, it heavily depends on an X server for the 2d rendering which embedded Linux distributions like Android don't have. It also has no OpenGL ES support at all, which would mean they'd need a shim like Google's ANGLE riding on top of a bloated OpenGL driver that they already aren't fully licensed to use themselves that ships in their proprietary Linux and Windows drivers already.

Item 3: They've already said they do benefit from DRM indirectly in that it's easier to roll over and ask the MAFIAA to screw AMD's customers with no lube than it is to draw a line and tell them to fuck off and come back when things are less contaminated. They're all too happy to collaborate with criminals to build this stuff into their hardware, so it entirely AMD's fault that they can't document parts of their own hardware. You can lob any stupid argument against this you want but I won't budge.

If you read Theo de Raadt's "Intel is only OPEN for business" article from 2006 where they were being boner biting bastards about their hardware documentation and firmware redistribution, I think you'll find a lot of it is unfortunately relevant to the situation with AMD. Unfortunately it is still more of a fit for Intel and Nvidia's continued behavior which is why I'm not using them. Nvidia hands down makes better hardware, but when it comes to openness, they want to kill with fire any technical details about their cards that can get out there. If Nvidia had open drivers, we wouldn't be discussing this and I'd just be using Nvidia like I was 2-3 years ago before AMD had any open specifications and were every bit as nasty.

BTW, here's Theo de Raadt's article on Intel I promised with some choice quotes I feel apply a lot to AMD right now.

http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20060930232710&mode=expanded

Before we ask a vendor, we have already lost (ie. the device does not work). When a vendor says no, we have lost nothing further -- there is no way we can lose further than having the device not work. We can only win, and then the device works. So there is no point in giving up until we win back the rights to write software for the hardware that we have purchased.

This fits the HDMI audio situation like a glove.

These vendors often want a quiet private discussion, because in a quiet private discussion they can continue to dismiss the requests and in the end do absolutely nothing. They do not want a noisy public discussion, because then they look bad. But they DESERVE TO LOOK BAD, because they are being bad to those who bought their hardware!

Yes, AMD has a few people here to do PR and damage control. After the article about HDMI audio support missing, they came to spin the situation back into AMD's favor and to derail the conversation with half-truths, impotent gestures, and outright obfuscations and lies. It is technically better than not responding at all I guess, a lot of companies that have been approached by open source developers just asking for rights to redistribute their non-free firmware have had their requests go totally unanswered for a long time. (See OpenBSD v. Texas Instruments). The fact that they have yet to reply in a fully honest and open manner does bother me. Perhaps they can rectify this in the future.

In this particular case, we would like more documentation for the Intel wireless chips. Damien [Bergamini] has already written drivers that make the devices work quite well... but there are still bugs, since all of this is based on reverse engineering efforts. The drivers could be better. Intel stands in the way of your devices working as well as they should.

(emphasis mine)

Again, replace Intel with AMD and you have the same situation with HDMI audio on Radeons.

Quite frankly, Intel has been a royal pain in the ass. Not to us, but to people who bought their devices.

Replace Intel with AMD.

Intel also must grant these rights freely

Replace Intel with AMD again here. Actually I'd rather AMD be total dickheads here because then I end up using free software that was the result of reverse engineering rather than a really long strand of obfuscated code that has no commenting and would be even harder to figure out. (Nvidia did this with nv where they had an insane formula just to represent a constant).

By withholding, Intel is being an Open Source fraud.

Replace Intel with AMD.

-----

Note that this is not a rant. A rant doesn't provide facts and counter-arguments that disassemble the propaganda spread by the original comment. A rant is merely an attack without any constructive criticism at all. I am mad that AMD is voluntarily withholding programming specs, that they lie about why they do it, and use the words "Industry" and "everyone" to talk about a few companies and lobbying groups (The unholy triad at Apple, Microsoft, and the MPAA) that should be investigated under acts including Sherman, Hobbs, RICO, and at least in Microsoft's case, Sarbanes-Oxley.

Thank you.

[Kjella]

*rant*

The easiest AMD could do is to be like nVidia. Source? No. Specs? No. Buzz off and go away. All you get a blob and the license says "No Reverse Engineering. Customer may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the SOFTWARE, nor attempt in any other manner to obtain the source code."

Is AMD completely and utterly committed to making open source drivers? Hell no, for one thing they'd like to stay in business. Sure, they could just post the full source of their proprietary driver here, they'd only get sued to oblivion and have all their graphics cards blacklisted. So because they're not doing that, they're not trying. *rollseyes*

You are starting your raving at the completely wrong end. AMD doesn't have any benefit from DRM, if it all magically went away they'd sell graphics cards like before. Maybe even more. It starts with Hollywood, they want DRM. They pressure Microsoft and say either you accept DRM, or Windows won't play BluRays - only standalone players. So Microsoft turns around and says okay, to get the Windows logo the graphics card must implement DRM. And if you want to deliver to 95% of the market, actually 99% because it's same with Apple then you say yes. What do you want from AMD, corporate suicide? Make Hollywood stop demanding DRM, then AMD will stop delivering it. If not, Hollywood will go to someone who will.

[Kjella]

I'm sure amd can make profit in making hardware for 1-2% of the most computer addicted people on earth.

thats the REAL point!

1-2% of a market where many are just as much "free as in beer" as "free as in freedom", on a platform that has no high-end games to speak of and that will lack many features simply because it's not within AMDs power to deliver them legally so people will continue to whine and not buy it. Your point has no basis in reality....

[DaemonFC]

Worth noting. When you use the words "everyone" and "industry" to talk about a grand total of 5 or 6 companies, it means that there would be antitrust issues investigated if our government wasn't bought by these companies to begin with.

[DaemonFC]

I'm sure amd can make profit in making hardware for 1-2% of the most computer addicted people on earth.

thats the REAL point!

They work with the "industry" (really Apple and Microsoft and Hollywood) to screw over their users and claim "everyone" (being AMD, Intel, and Nvidia all do it) as if that justifies their dishonest business practices.

Collaborators with all kinds of criminals throughout history have used similar excuses and it didn't fly then either.

[DaemonFC]

If something depends on DRM, I'd rather not have that thing, period. At least not until the DRM is reliably broken and I am guaranteed the ability to use what I bought on the device of my choice and at the time and place I choose to.

If there were really so many details to getting HDMI audio to work, it wouldn't be relatively well working through reverse engineering. They need to be honest that the reason for a few people booting up with blank screens due to the reverse engineered code that is "not always right" is because of their organized crime bosses at Apple, Microsoft, and Hollywood. Even though Bridgman tries to be apologists by making it sound like the DRM plague isn't all the fault of the aforementioned companies and the companies that work with them (mostly AMD, Nvidia, and Intel), they're probably more than 95% of the problem between just the ones I've mentioned.

Don't worry, the criminals buy laws to make you the criminal for foiling their plot and working around the limitations they've put into their products. I wonder when AMD plans to obfuscate HDMI audio further so that it can't be made to work at all. Probably whenever Hollywood and Microsoft and Apple tell them to.

[AnonymousCoward]

AMD makes a mistake by tying itself too much to the Microsoft Windows platform. Big mistake! If they want to a piece of the growing tablet and mobile market they should forget about Windows. Nobody wants Windows on their phone, tablet or other mobile device!



AMD should focus on getting good Linux/Android support for their hardware, this is the future for tablets not Windows.

[Wingfeather]

@DaemonFC

Wow man, no need to be so hostile. If I had to guess why HDMI audio is encumbered with DRM in the hardware, I'd say that it's because the development on these GPUs began several years before ATI/AMD decided they wanted to support open-source drivers. Thus they took the easiest/default route with integrating various bits of hardware IP and this is how it ended up. It's not 'badly designed' - in my experience the hardware works rather beautifully well in the environment for which it was intended. Neither does it mean they aren't doing the best they can with regards to open-source on the hardware that actually exists right now. They are.

Also, AMD's people have said several times that since open-source is now an active target, the newer generations of hardware will have taken these issues into account and this sort of problem should happen less. For example, newer generations of UVD should be accessible to open drivers, just the way Intel's decoding hardware is.

I don't understand why you are complaining about AMD entering into DRM agreements, either, unless it is just a foil to 'justify' you shouting at people. It is as simple as this: graphics hardware needs to be DRM-compliant or it won't sell. The idea of them changing this just to work better for open-source customers is, due to market realities, sort've laughable. Some of your other posts paint you as rather a Conservative, so this should be something you understand.

Also, FWIW, your conspiracy theories make you sound slightly crazy.

[bridgman]

I've seen a lot of unfortunate use of the industry propaganda term "IP" in here, which stands for Intellectual Property. It's an umbrella term designed to confuse people about several different and not always similar laws.

It's also a convenient term to cover a half dozen different issues (some related to standards licensing, some related to trade secrets, all involving copyright in some form). In cases where I can't go into details, what umbrella term would you recommend ?

It would be nicer for propagandists like Alex Deucher and John Bridgman to unmuddle the situation and use the words copyright or patented when appropriate

See above. The whole point is that I can't go into details while the issues are being worked out. This shouldn't be a surprise.

and to come out and admit they're not allowed to tell us how some parts of their hardware work due to contracts that AMD and the rest of the PC industry willfully entered into with Microsoft and Apple and a number of other groups in order to be able to participate in the largest parts of the PC market.

Fixed that for you.

Not sure what your point is here. We've been saying this since we started the open source project. We've also been saying that it's not obvious where the exact line is between what we can and can't tell you about, and that in some cases it's an expensive and time-consuming process to figure it out for each different area. We focused on core things first like 3D acceleration but even that took a couple of years and significant effort from a lot of people internally.

They're not struggling to help open source, if they were they wouldn't have kissed Microsoft's ass in those damned dirty backroom DRM deals.

You mean "we would make hardware that could only be sold in 1-2% of the PC market" ? Seriously, I don't know why you feel compelled to blame us for everything in the PC industry and make sneaky suggestions that somehow "it's just us".

When you're ready to talk about serious proposals that would not drastically reduce our GPU business let me know.

It'd be nice if someone from AMD could also explain why their hardware is so badly designed that HDMI audio itself has been intertwined with the DRM called HDCP.

I would venture a guess that the two really have nothing to do with one another and we're getting more lies from AMD because their masters in organized crime don't want HDMI audio there at all because it brings the open source community a step closer to being able to easily watch Blu Ray movies.

HDCP is only one part of it. I wish it were that simple.

Not sure where your "badly designed" thinking is coming from. Integrating blocks makes the chip smaller, and lets us give you more performance and features for the same $$. If you call that bad design I don't know how to respond. Integrating blocks also has a downside in terms of making it more difficult to support with open source drivers; the challenge is finding the right balance.

[DaemonFC]

I've seen a lot of unfortunate use of the industry propaganda term "IP" in here, which stands for Intellectual Property. It's an umbrella term designed to confuse people about several different and not always similar laws.

It would be nicer for propagandists like Alex Deucher and John Bridgman to unmuddle the situation and use the words copyright or patented when appropriate, and to come out and admit they're not allowed to tell us how some parts of their hardware work due to contracts that AMD willfully entered into with Microsoft and Apple.

They're not struggling to help open source, if they were they wouldn't have kissed Microsoft's ass in those damned dirty backroom DRM deals.

Don't piss on us and say it's raining please. As for the reverse engineered HDMI audio support from Rafał Miłecki, thank you so much. If we had to rely on AMD sitting there with their thumbs up their asses over back alley Microsoft deals they don't want to take the blame for, then something tells me nobody using a Radeon would have HDMI audio support for a very long time if ever.

It'd be nice if someone from AMD could also explain why their hardware is so badly designed that HDMI audio itself has been intertwined with the DRM called HDCP.

I would venture a guess that the two really have nothing to do with one another and we're getting more lies from AMD because their masters in organized crime don't want HDMI audio there at all because it brings the open source community a step closer to being able to easily watch Blu Ray movies.