"Simple. We had to choose between releasing most of the information quickly or all of the information a lot later. We figured that getting 95% of the informnation out quickly was best; we do expect to go back and fill in gaps."
Then we agree, this is the way to do things.
"Actually Linux market penetration seems to be a lot higher in workstation than in consumer desktop; not quite midway between consumer desktop and server but enough that workstation is much more significant than you might think. "
well, if it is so significant, then it stands to reason that the open source drivers should get alot more attention.
"This is hotly debated. Stability seems to be a function of complexity and resources available, ie one reason the open source drivers appear more stable is that they don't try to do as much. As we complete the move from largely Linux-specific code to largely common code I think you will see most of the remaining stability issues go away. "
i seem to recall that 25% of vista crashes is caused by ATI driver, around 40% by nvidia driver.. thats a hell of alot of crashes, now being woven into Linux.
Also, i do not believe you are correct about the "opensource drivers are more stable because it does less", linux, apache, hell, virtually all of the free software stack, proves otherwise.
"Are you actually seeing that today ? Most of the issues I have seen are primarily related to bits of functionality which were lost or changed during the transition from the old OpenGL code base to the new one. If you take AGP systems out of the equation (AGP brings a host of other stability challenges) the new driver *seems* to be pretty stable today. "
If you happen to run some magic SLED combination of patched weird versions of software.. I do not.
I do however find it relatively disturbing that it sets incorrect resolution, seems to be left in weird broken states by wine after it closes, requiring me to execute another opengl all (most seem to work, and then "correct" the issue). Video is still completely broken and useless in fglrx, and this is not just me having this issue.
" One important point here -- if the driver simply doesn't start up on a specific configuration I would not call that a stability issue, would you ?" No, however i do find it to be of a very big concern, the amount of times "THIS" issue comes up, seriously, if you buy 10 pc's, install ubuntu, gentoo, sled, fedora, rhel, arch, debian, opensuse, slackware, mandriva. One distribution on each PC.
Then insert an nvidia OLD to NEW card, and try the driver, i think you will find that their closed driver will work on all of them, without problems(well, except for the lousy quality of their driver), but now insert an old (say.. X300) to new (Say, 3870, let alone the X2's) in them, and attempt fglrx, well.. you are maybe looking at it working on 1 or 2 without tinkering, after tinkering, maybe 5 or 8, and 2 of them flat out not working with fglrx. This isnt a stability issue, but a serious compatiblity issue nonetheless, something the free driver will completely remove.
Then we agree, this is the way to do things.
"Actually Linux market penetration seems to be a lot higher in workstation than in consumer desktop; not quite midway between consumer desktop and server but enough that workstation is much more significant than you might think. "
well, if it is so significant, then it stands to reason that the open source drivers should get alot more attention.
"This is hotly debated. Stability seems to be a function of complexity and resources available, ie one reason the open source drivers appear more stable is that they don't try to do as much. As we complete the move from largely Linux-specific code to largely common code I think you will see most of the remaining stability issues go away. "
i seem to recall that 25% of vista crashes is caused by ATI driver, around 40% by nvidia driver.. thats a hell of alot of crashes, now being woven into Linux.
Also, i do not believe you are correct about the "opensource drivers are more stable because it does less", linux, apache, hell, virtually all of the free software stack, proves otherwise.
"Are you actually seeing that today ? Most of the issues I have seen are primarily related to bits of functionality which were lost or changed during the transition from the old OpenGL code base to the new one. If you take AGP systems out of the equation (AGP brings a host of other stability challenges) the new driver *seems* to be pretty stable today. "
If you happen to run some magic SLED combination of patched weird versions of software.. I do not.
I do however find it relatively disturbing that it sets incorrect resolution, seems to be left in weird broken states by wine after it closes, requiring me to execute another opengl all (most seem to work, and then "correct" the issue). Video is still completely broken and useless in fglrx, and this is not just me having this issue.
" One important point here -- if the driver simply doesn't start up on a specific configuration I would not call that a stability issue, would you ?" No, however i do find it to be of a very big concern, the amount of times "THIS" issue comes up, seriously, if you buy 10 pc's, install ubuntu, gentoo, sled, fedora, rhel, arch, debian, opensuse, slackware, mandriva. One distribution on each PC.
Then insert an nvidia OLD to NEW card, and try the driver, i think you will find that their closed driver will work on all of them, without problems(well, except for the lousy quality of their driver), but now insert an old (say.. X300) to new (Say, 3870, let alone the X2's) in them, and attempt fglrx, well.. you are maybe looking at it working on 1 or 2 without tinkering, after tinkering, maybe 5 or 8, and 2 of them flat out not working with fglrx. This isnt a stability issue, but a serious compatiblity issue nonetheless, something the free driver will completely remove.
Comment