AMD Documentation Drop Next Week

[Svartalf]

I guess this is why "not documenting" seems like the universal solution to so many people

Yanno...

I've always held the position that you don't need to be band-aiding silicon bugs with driver "fixes". It might be a universal solution, but if you've got a lot of those things you might want to re-think your engineering process and quality process- because you don't have the quality there. I'd consider documenting things something of an accountability thing. If you can hide embarrassing crap with driver cover-ups, then you tend to not care as much on the silicon side with quality- when both software AND hardware honestly need to be much more dead-on than it seems to have been getting lately.

Design flaws are design flaws. You should be striving to AVOID them, not hide them.

But, I suspect I'm a preaching to the choir a bit here, aren't I? >:-)

[bridgman]

>>But, I suspect I'm a preaching to the choir a bit here, aren't I? >:-)

Just a bit

[Svartalf]

>>But, I suspect I'm a preaching to the choir a bit here, aren't I? >:-)

Just a bit

Believe me when I say I'm VERY glad that this is the case.

I just wish we'd started this journey with AMD about 6 or so months earlier- we'd be looking at a better picture, I suspect, if we had. Oh, well, it's getting much better each time we see the docs, so I'm not going to gripe TOO much... >:-)

[Xemanth]

One thing which I don't understand is that why do we ship code from radeon to radeonhd and from radeonhd to radeon?

Why don't we just migrate these two drivers together ^^ It would be nice easier to select appropriate driver for own use then when you just need to remember to put "ati" as driver =)

I hope that these docs which are going to be released will help my system:
00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 Host Bridge (rev 10)
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RS485 [Radeon Xpress 1100 IGP]

I miss only two things: dri + power saving

[givemesugarr]

One thing which I don't understand is that why do we ship code from radeon to radeonhd and from radeonhd to radeon?

Why don't we just migrate these two drivers together ^^ It would be nice easier to select appropriate driver for own use then when you just need to remember to put "ati" as driver =)

I hope that these docs which are going to be released will help my system:
00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 Host Bridge (rev 10)
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RS485 [Radeon Xpress 1100 IGP]

I miss only two things: dri + power saving

well, the radeonhd is pure code from the documentation and includes some code from the radeon one for things that work in about the same way. the problem is that radeon driver includes a lot of reverse engineered code which in the future won't be needed. then there's another problem with older chips which cannot be supported immediately with a new code driver as radeonhd. it was said here that in the future the oss ati drivers would merge all into one single driver, but for that we'll have to wait one or 2 years if not more.

the next documentation drop won't help your's and mine board... that board (xpress 200m) is quite known and it's reported to both work and not work. it seems that it has a proper soul and intelligence and acts accordingly to what it wants. we could say that ati has created the first artificial intelligence in the world with this board.

[Michael]

Good morning and happy documentation drop day!

[BlackStar]

Awesome!

[d2kx]

Good morning and happy documentation drop day!

Yarrr! That's how we like it!

[Svartalf]

the next documentation drop won't help your's and mine board... that board (xpress 200m) is quite known and it's reported to both work and not work. it seems that it has a proper soul and intelligence and acts accordingly to what it wants. we could say that ati has created the first artificial intelligence in the world with this board.

I'm more of the opinion that it's a touchy chip- one of those things that Jeff and I were discussing. I suspect that if you don't do things in a just-so manner with it then it won't work correctly. The reason why we see "odd" inconsistent behaviors from person to person is that each person has a different brand of desktop or laptop motherboard and the BIOS variations for start-up are causing...issues...with the driver. I suspect that the Windows driver goes and does a full-on reset of things and does it in the right "just-so" way, and the Linux driver either doesn't or can't do it reliably.

[Michael]

It's out: http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showt...newpost&t=7225