AMD Catalyst 8.7 Linux Driver Released

[marcobrancalion]

Nv now works, in viewing videos.

But, the sloppiness in 2D acceleration (even in stupid things like normale konsole windows of KDE) forced me to revert back to the 8.5 release.


As always, the work of guys at AMD's is INSULTING, for ati cards owners.
I'm firm with my intention to have absolutely an Nvidia card in my next laptop (i hope soon).
Even a shitty Nvidia card will work better with linux than my 'wonderful' Ati X1400.

[oyvind]

I've found that fglrx/XVideo crash the X server whenever xine reaches the end of a media file during normal playback. The work-around is either to use XShm instead of XVideo, or to quit xine before it reaches the end. This has been true with every fglrx module I've tested so far (up to 8.6, haven't tested 8.7 yet) for the past 12 months.

Yup, you are right, sir. I've set Xine (v 0.99.6cvs) to OpenGL-output, for now. This should be easy to reproduce, ATI guys. Just play something with Xine using xv output module, skip to near the end of the video and let it finish. Then watch your beautiful console appear, as X dies and restarts. My GPU is an X1400 Radeon Mobility. Ubuntu Hardy 32bit.

[yoshi314]

As always, the work of guys at AMD's is INSULTING, for ati cards owners.

they're doing much better, but there are still brown-paper-bag bugs in the driver. i'd rather see fglrx come out every 3 months if it would guarantee better driver quality.

[sundown]

Yup, you are right, sir. I've set Xine (v 0.99.6cvs) to OpenGL-output, for now. This should be easy to reproduce, ATI guys. Just play something with Xine using xv output module, skip to near the end of the video and let it finish. Then watch your beautiful console appear, as X dies and restarts. My GPU is an X1400 Radeon Mobility. Ubuntu Hardy 32bit.

It's funny because I think there is a different behaviour under KDE. When the end of a video is reached, the KDE crash handler appears without X dying. But then again, I do this with Kaffeine which uses Xine.

[bridgman]

It was master branch of radeonhd - I used to check it out from time to time. It was few days ago - this driver just for the first time suddenly refused to detect (even grab EDID) from my setup. Xorg.0.log shew some atombios entries, so it looks to me that some atombios code was being included in master branch.

Ahh. There has been *some* atombios usage for perhaps 10 months; the difference is that the atombios-support branch uses atombios for most of the modesetting operations while master only uses atombios for a couple of initialization functions. If you weren't using the atombios-support branch I doubt your problems had anything to do with atombios.

What's the best way to contact radeonhd team and give them some feedback about this? Looks like my configuration (Sapphire x1950 PRO AGP, AOC 9k+ CRT monitor, connected by DVI<->DSub cable) is quite hard to detect as radeonhd driver used to be the ONLY that was able to work without Modelines, "Driver" section Options except "norandr" and with no "Monitor" section at all. ATI proprietary doesn't work automagically here - and xf86-video-ati rejects Modelines - so probalby my feedback would help solving some issues.

Probably best to subscribe to the radeonhd mailing list (info at http://lists.opensuse.org/radeonhd and post a message there.

[NeoBrain]

are you talking about distorted image like this one : http://launchpadlibrarian.net/12254636/Screenshot.jpg , or is it something else?

Nope, I'm talking about that one:

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13335

Prevents me from playing anything demanding on Wine, really sucks...
IIRC the problem has been existing since around 8.44, if not even 8.42 (i.e. with the new code base).
I guess that only computers with lower memory (I got 512 MB RAM) experience this problem as the explanation somewhere in the bug report suggests...
However, the corruption thing (which I also had) seems to be fixed.

[shreg]

Does anyone have tried it with a dual desktop settings?

If yes, is the video or opengl workings fine on both screen without compiz ? and with compiz?

thanks

[Porter]

Yup, you are right, sir. I've set Xine (v 0.99.6cvs) to OpenGL-output, for now. This should be easy to reproduce, ATI guys. Just play something with Xine using xv output module, skip to near the end of the video and let it finish. Then watch your beautiful console appear, as X dies and restarts. My GPU is an X1400 Radeon Mobility. Ubuntu Hardy 32bit.

There is a similar problem with RealPlayer 11 for Linux, which I believe is based on the Helix DNA Client. I have no clue whether Helix may also exhibit the problem.

[SavageX]

Good release for me so far (Radeon 3850, x86_64 Ubuntu 8.04) - now playing videos in Kaffeine won't crash the X server anymore for me, can you believe it!

Sorry to hear others aren't that lucky, though.

[alexcorscadden]

Sadly, the context creation issue (the successive connection bug) is still present. If one of the AMD folks wants to contact me, I have source for a small test app that I submitted to someone at AMD/ATI a few months back that very quickly (2 seconds to compile, less than a second to run) proves the existence of this bug.

Stability seems to be better now. I can call glXCreateNewContext without risking a segfault deep inside libGL.