AMD Catalyst 8.5 For Linux

[Redeeman]

Redeeman,

If you can provide some contrasting examples, we can work through some of deltas between distributions.

NVidia have slightly different approaches but typically fall down in similar positions (except the DRI/GL interfaces since they completely replace that - this lowers the switching cost to NVidia and makes it work easier, but considerably increases the switching cost to anything else).

There are a few areas that could be called stress points with the distribution. In general these are the kernel, X ABI and more recent DRI/GL interfaces. Distributions or users going bleeding edge (.99 or .90 X versions), -rcxx kernels, complicate the matter more. Then hardware/kernel interplay is also a big factor.

Realistically, a lot of the posts of problems leave out critical information that would allow users to see trends. AGP vs PCIe vs PCI, AGP Chipset, CPU, Memory, kernel, distribution, etc. All of those have an impact on the system.

A lot of posts just say "my 3450 doesn't work". That could be any 1 of 3 product families (PCI, PCIe, AGP), on any number of distributions. Then config files and other critical information is ignored, or if it is presented, then it contains clearly cut and pasted items from forums across the internet. I am not saying the driver is perfect, but a lot of the time there is precious little information to understand the issues or establish trends. (Trends are needed to determine if it is broken hardware for a single user, to ensure internal repeatability).

Realistically, NV News Linux Forum shows lots of issues with NV drivers. Graphics drivers are complex beasts (we currently support 301 different pieces of hardware within the drivers), and as John says there are more distributions than developers.

Regards,

Matthew

i dont believe there even exists pci or agp 3450.
and almost all of these distributions are simply a "respin" of the major dists, but with changed background image, this does not count in my eyes as "another distribution", or at the very least, not in the eyes of fglrx.

About nvidia, yes, i agree that their drivers are extremely far from bug free, they are in fact what i'd call quite crappy, but with them, i know i get the same treatment whether i go fedora, suse, debian, or gentoo, and this is something i have put to test many times.

I guess you are somewhat missing my point.

The thing i have a hard time accepting, is that "this does not work on distro gah", this to me is useless, if you instead can provide me with information such as "this driver will work with X versions blalblaba, provided you have kernel versions lalalala, with hardware tralalall", then thats fine.

[Raven3x7]

I' dont recall having any such probs in Arch. I'll update QW to 1.6 and test it later today.

[mtippett]

bridgman:
I am extremely concerned by the fact that the drivers seems to only work on SOME distributions..

Redeeman,

If you can provide some contrasting examples, we can work through some of deltas between distributions.

NVidia have slightly different approaches but typically fall down in similar positions (except the DRI/GL interfaces since they completely replace that - this lowers the switching cost to NVidia and makes it work easier, but considerably increases the switching cost to anything else).

There are a few areas that could be called stress points with the distribution. In general these are the kernel, X ABI and more recent DRI/GL interfaces. Distributions or users going bleeding edge (.99 or .90 X versions), -rcxx kernels, complicate the matter more. Then hardware/kernel interplay is also a big factor.

Realistically, a lot of the posts of problems leave out critical information that would allow users to see trends. AGP vs PCIe vs PCI, AGP Chipset, CPU, Memory, kernel, distribution, etc. All of those have an impact on the system.

A lot of posts just say "my 3450 doesn't work". That could be any 1 of 3 product families (PCI, PCIe, AGP), on any number of distributions. Then config files and other critical information is ignored, or if it is presented, then it contains clearly cut and pasted items from forums across the internet. I am not saying the driver is perfect, but a lot of the time there is precious little information to understand the issues or establish trends. (Trends are needed to determine if it is broken hardware for a single user, to ensure internal repeatability).

Realistically, NV News Linux Forum shows lots of issues with NV drivers. Graphics drivers are complex beasts (we currently support 301 different pieces of hardware within the drivers), and as John says there are more distributions than developers.

Regards,

Matthew

[Redeeman]

bridgman:
I am extremely concerned by the fact that the drivers seems to only work on SOME distributions..

Unless some distribution does something really weird(which ubuntu probably does), it should just work.. no crap, no testing needed, just work, as well as it should on suse and fedora, and it indeed seems to for nvidia, Please please explain to me why this is different for AMD?

It does not matter how many distributions there are, the kernel, and X, and applications, are the same deal, the only difference is some provided tools and minor(only in some cases even exists) patches to change trivial things. in short, NOTHING that should EVER be relevant to the fglrx driver..

and most of those "distributions" which there is, is nothing more than remasters of the major distributions, which simply includes stuff presetup, or differently bundled applications, or SOME minor thing, hell, i've seen lots of "distros" which were nothing more than modified ubuntu to have different background image after install!

[bridgman]

Also different OS distributions, different buses, and different chipsets, and different amounts of "tweaking the OS" since initial installation.

I realized (sadly) today that there are more different Linux distros than there are X developers in the world, even including the Linux driver teams from Intel, NVidia and ATI/AMD in the count. That just ain't right.

[Porter]

I've had no problems under Ubuntu, and with the latest driver I eliminated all of the extra xorg.conf entries and let the defaults take over... it seems to work great.

It's interesting that people have such different experiences, I can only guess it's due to differences in implementation for each of the different video cards that the driver supports.

[bridgman]

The Ubuntu situation should be starting to improve; our testing had focused on RH and SuSE distros (that's what workstation users tend to run with) but we're starting to ramp up testing on Ubuntu. The Ubuntu packaging folks are also working hard to make things "just work".

[Vighy]

Just as a general question and also not to insult Ubuntu too much... But, has anyone else noticed the lesser ease of installation of the ATi drivers within Ubuntu 8.04?

I find it rather annoying to have to have all the little extras in the xorg.conf to get it to actually work.

I spent about half hour trying to get it to work last time I format, not really impressed with 8.04.

Maybe it could be that I have about 120 updates I need to install... Some of those may help fix bugs within the system.

Anywho, laters.

Bas.

touching xorg.conf on ubuntu is, i think, useless, since there are a lot of utilities that help configure xorg properly.

installoing the last nVidia drivers i experienced Xorg hangs, so i rebooted under "recovery mode" and appeared to me a utility that reconfigured Xorg automatically, and then it worked as expected!

Nothing has been more simple in past!

[Tarmael]

Just as a general question...

Just as a general question and also not to insult Ubuntu too much... But, has anyone else noticed the lesser ease of installation of the ATi drivers within Ubuntu 8.04?

I find it rather annoying to have to have all the little extras in the xorg.conf to get it to actually work.

I spent about half hour trying to get it to work last time I format, not really impressed with 8.04.

Maybe it could be that I have about 120 updates I need to install... Some of those may help fix bugs within the system.

Anywho, laters.

Bas.

[Vighy]

Anyone able to use this driver with a recent .26 kernel?

yeah it works! with 2.6.25.4 tuxonice and gentoo-sources. and it worked also on 2.6.25. I'm running a 64bit system and i didn't patch the kernel.