AMD Catalyst 12.3 For Linux Officially Released

[zzarko]

It works somehow...

OK, creating deb files was a no-no... I installed the driver directly from the installer and now it works (after fiddling with xrandr to add 1920x1200 resolution to monitor). But, now I have another problem: my new monitor is 1920x1200, and my old projector can accepr resolutions up to 1920x540. Is there a way to scale screen in clone mode for displays with lower maximum resolution?

[DaemonFC]

Kano, I know you understand this and are just having fun, but in case anyone else was confused by this...

The PCI IDs in the code determine which hardware the driver will *try* to run on. The code might work perfectly, or be buggy, or fail to run at all.

The PCI IDs in the control file show which hardware the driver has passed QA on. The time and effort is not to add IDs to the file (that's all automated anyways) but to do the testing, bug fixing and re-testing required to pass QA on the hardware.

Once testing and bug fixing on specific hardware is completed, the IDs in the control file are updated to reflect that these binaries form a production driver for the hardware it's running on, whereas previously it displayed a "hey this might run but be aware it's not a production driver" message.

Is the watermark too intrusive ? In my personal opinion something like a one-time splash at startup would be better. The question though is whether the devs should be working on getting production support in place more quickly or spending that time on rewriting the watermark code so that running a pre-production driver isn't as annoying. I would put available people on speeding up production support myself, which is what seems to be happening, but I realize not everyone agrees with that and it's kind of academic because I'm not involved with fglrx development anyways.

As we get more consistent at posting SKU-specific launch drivers if a regular Catalyst release with support isn't coming out at the right time, I think you'll find the watermarks become less of an issue anyways.

You should watermark everyone's hardware with "Catalyst is broken messed up shit that will bring down your system and cause data loss. Don't install it on a system where you have anything important. In fact, just run rm-rf on random paths and files and you'll get the gist of the experience without having a 100 MB blob of who knows what running in your kernel." Catalyst is truly unsafe at any speed.

[allquixotic]

You should watermark everyone's hardware with "Catalyst is broken messed up shit that will bring down your system and cause data loss. Don't install it on a system where you have anything important. In fact, just run rm-rf on random paths and files and you'll get the gist of the experience without having a 100 MB blob of who knows what running in your kernel." Catalyst is truly unsafe at any speed.

+1000. Having a watermark to specifically say that some hardware may be buggy is based upon the flawed assumption that if your hardware passed QA, then everything is fine and dandy and the driver works 100%.

But no, I don't think it's worth AMD's time to code up some way for people to disable the watermark. I already have code on the Phoronix forums for gutting it out of your driver. Just run the code and get on with your life.

On the other hand, I wouldn't be at all surprised if AMD did something tricky to deeply obfuscate their watermarking code so that you can't (easily) disable it with a binary hack anymore. They're fine with spending engineering effort to prevent people from doing things that help themselves, but if you ask them to spend 5 minutes to help the user, it's "you either let us work on the driver or we drop everything, no progress gets made, and we spend days of lost productivity just trying to satisfy you and your greedy need to have a driver that doesn't splat a big green watermark in the bottom-right corner".

I know I'm greatly exaggerating and grossly overstating the problem and dramatizing it, but I'm feeling abusive today. The world has been abusive to me, so I'm randomly lashing out. Disregard this post, bridgman -- I really like fglrx. With lolsed run over it, of course. :P

[Kano]

Maybe you did not notice that I binary hacked fglrx to support Xorg 1.3 and to get rid of the watermark. But i absolutely hate that this is needed at all, that's complete nonsense to mark a driver that it was not tested on that specific hardware. You gain nothing with that info, if the driver works you see a stupid logo and you hate it. If it would not work at all then you don't see a logo, nice