AMD Admits It Has Linux Problems

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Admits It Has Linux Problems

AMD admits it has had some Linux support problems with its graphics drivers and they'll be working to improve the situation...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTEwODk

[mikeplus64]

AMD has Linux problems. We've all been there before, man. You should come by our Linux Anonymous meetings, they're on every Saturday night.

[darkbasic]

Only on linux? I still have to understand why the [email protected] OpenCL Windows client needs to waste an entire CPU core on the AMD gpus while it doesn't on Nvidia.

[cynyr]

distributions...

- Neal Robinson, Senior Director of Consumer Developer Support at AMD, outright says they have more work to do in the Linux space. He adds that it's "more complex" due to different Linux distributions.

So why can nvidia make it work? From what I can tell they have an "opensource" part and a binary driver part. They then wrote a bash script that unextracts all of this, compiles the source part for your current kernel packages it and the binary part together in a module and puts that module in /lib/modules/*.

Or was he meaning that they only want to supply full pre-compiled binaries for specific kernels? They could provide something like nvidia's setup and let the distros package it for them. Heck even gentoo just runs nvidia's script.

[makoto42]

Yes, but...

What about XvBA, that can't seem to do profile 5.1? Or do they think that OpenCL ffmpeg work will naturally obviate the utility of XvBA? If that worked (and better yet, if it could be used to process 10 bit per channel video on current hardware), I may be placated.

My other big issue is that Mythfrontend OpenGL support works terribly on fglrx drivers, and can't be used (if QT menu painter is used, menu is not rerendered on opengl video playback, if GL painter used, the menu doesn't redraw itself after descending into a menu item). This is critically bad as it's the only way to get away from tearing.

Basically, if AMD can't get those two addressed by 12.7 or so (whenever they drop support for my IGP), I'll have no way to evaluate if they are more acceptable. If they did fix this, then I'd probably get an HD7770 for my next system. Otherwise, I'm waiting on a mid-range Kepler.....

[Kano]

Basically the amd installer is also a makeself variant just like the nvidia one. Both are patched in differnet directions, the nvidia one can rebuild itself with additional patches the amd one writes the control file and supports custom scripts for distributions to create packages.

Also both have got binary bits precompiled for the xserver and a binary and an opensource part for the kernel module. Informer amd shipped for every xserver they supported another binary file, now they follow more the nvidia path with one file for all. You can already fix the fglrx kernel builds up to kernel 3.3 with user patches, but the most problematic part is the binary xorg driver. As long as amd is not forced to update (like sheduled ubuntu releases) they just ignore the existance...

[DINAMIK]

I dont know how to say this in english:

"la mentira de seguir hardcodeando los controladores llego a su fin"


something like:

"the lie to continue hardcoding the drivers has reached the end"

[TheBlackCat]

I dont know how to say this in english:

"la mentira de seguir hardcodeando los controladores llego a su fin"


something like:

"the lie to continue hardcoding the drivers has reached the end"

When I was reading that the first time I misread it as
"la mierda de seguir hardcodeando los controladores llego a su fin"

[DINAMIK]

When I was reading that the first time I misread it as
"la mierda de seguir hardcodeando los controladores llego a su fin"

amd dont give a shit the users, so, "mierda" is a nice word just in case

[schmidtbag]

They attribute their Linux problems to the fact that there's many Linux distributions out there rather than just a single platform like Microsoft Windows.

Oh, what's this? I seem to remember telling someone this exact same problem a few days ago on the Mageia 2 topic.