fglrx sucks...

[bugmenot]

I agree that with you that Ati has wasted time and money on funding radeonhd [...]

Hm, I can't see why the money is wasted. radeon supports so many old models and it makes sense to start from a new base for only new chips. And afaik the radeon 3d support was only possible because they could use code from radeonhd. For me both projects make perfect sense. Radeonhd seems more stable to me, maybe even "cleaner", it runs perfectly here and I just hope to get 3d for my 780G onboard chip soon...
And what about the mac modells of graphic cards without atombios? I am happy that there is radeonhd. And even if radeon makes "cooler features", radeonhd can easyly adopt them and everyone is happy?

[madman2k]

and wasting even more time porting your new propriatary code base from windows, and then even more time and money trying to work around your flawed DRM laden video hardware,it would already be done.

I agree that with you that Ati has wasted time and money on funding radeonhd, but hey it was their first attempt on Open Source.
But I dont think they wasted their time on polishing fglrx. If there was not fglrx we would not be able to play any newer game even now, since the OSS graphics stack just sucks right now.
A friend of mine has an linux laptop with an intel chip and while its all cool as long you stick with 2D and simple 3D it totally breaks down when it comes to gaming. Many games dont even start, because there is this or that patented extension missing.

Then there is DRM, for which a closed source stack is a requirement. Although I dont need it its up to Ati deciding if its worth keeping fglrx just for that.

My initial idea was to use as much as possible of the OSS driver for fglrx, so the latter would get all the improvements like DRI2, KMS and EXA for free. This more work would be put in the OSS driver while we would as well keep the advantages of an closed source driver.

[crumja]

http://www.csn.ul.ie/~airlied/ says David is an employee of redhat, though as I implied in my post, I have no knowledge of whether they are being indirectly financed by ATI/AMD.

From what I understand from past phoronix articles, ATI/AMD originally contracted Novell to develop radeonhd under NDA for the new cards while simultaneously releasing specs, though at a later date than the ones available to the devs. The guys from radeon then started to implement features using Atombios and the released specs and did so at a much faster pace.

Anyways, most of that is idle speculation, but you're definitely right in that it seems to be a major waste of resources. I don't see why we need two open-source drivers for the same cards. With that said, there have been some sharing of code as evidenced by the latest patches to hit radeonhd, which are taken from radeon. Also, it seems that the radeonhd devs have been under some pressure from AMD (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...atombios&num=1), possibly due to not providing good returns for the investment heh.

[duby229]

with Alex Deucher and David Airlie, has done a much better job

I agree they are doing a much better job... I think that Alex is payed by redhat with funding from ATi, and Dave is payed directly by ATi as an AMD employee.

So in addition to that they have a group at Novell that is also being paid by AT, and the folks that work directly for ATi writing the linux code for the closed driver that isnt covered by the common code. In addition they are still paying developers to port as much of the windows driver as possible to the common code base. They still have to do a bunch of video acceleration, and crossfire, and some 2d acceleration. And by the looks of how unstable fglrx is, probably a lot more...

I'm not sure what the exact number is, but I'd take a guess that ATi is paying somewhere round about 30 full time employees, working on these various projects and 26 of them are entirely wasting there talent. And all of them are highly skilled. Not many people are up on Linux graphics and driver development. So you know these guys are making a good buck.

[crumja]

I agree. ATI seems to be investing their resources unwisely. Novell's radeonhd project, which uses devs paid by ATI, has so far been slow and behind the curve because of their insistence on programming registers directly. Radeon, with Alex Deucher and David Airlie, has done a much better job of supporting the new hardware and adding cool features (DRI2, KMS, EXA perf, 3D, etc.) even though they're not being paid by ATI (afaik).

That begs the question - why not just scrap the radeonhd project and focus all the devs' energies on radeon?

As for an improved MM, Keith Packard and GEM are leading the way for Intel in terms of beefing up perf. Maybe the radeon guys can get their driver using GEM and/or TTM soon. Also, Intel is doing work on underlying improvements in Mesa. 7.1 should be out soon and that has a bunch of cool features and hopefully perf improvements planned. The work on Mesa will spill over and benefit all drivers.

[duby229]

Hello again. Sorry for the late response guys... I had an issue to take care of...

If we didn't also lose a big chunk of performance at the same time that is possible, but I don't see customers paying the same price for something that runs 20-30% slower. If you follow the IRC chatter (today in radeon is a good example) you'll see some clear signs that the current open source driver is not the foundation we want to be building on.

And it is entirely ATi's own fault. They'll never get the foundation that is right to build on if they dont allocate the required resources to make it. Instead you've got your resources split between just a handfull of guys that they have on there own payroll, a few guys at Redhat and a few guys at Novell.. I'm of the opinion that you guys need to tell Novell to suck on an orange, and then hire the guys that they get rid of. You can deny it, but I know for 100% fact that your investing a huge sum of resources providing Novell with both money and documentation. Reallocate that waste into something more productive. Novell over the last year has already proven that they dont have what it takes. Any further investment is a total waste of time and money. Drop them now while you still can.

I understand that mode setting will be in the kernel soon so that code will be moved out of the DDX driver. The only other thing the DDX needs to worry about is 2D and Video, which I understand the 2D acceleration code is pretty solid in radeon. Video needs to be rewritten but that is strictly 100% due to ATi wasting even more time and money on DRM. Which is such a massive waste that there is no other rival. If ATi had developed proper video hardware from the beginning there wouldnt be any problem with video acceleration.

Then the mesa driver, which I understand still needs alot of work, but this is exactly why you need to get on the ball and allocate the resources needed to get it up to par. If you had started it at full speed this time last year instead of dragging your feet and wasting time with Novell, and wasting even more time porting your new propriatary code base from windows, and then even more time and money trying to work around your flawed DRM laden video hardware,it would already be done.

At this point ATi is totally screwed once Intel gets a top end competitor.

[madman2k]

@bridgman:
still intel is showing the way in the respect, that they started the work on a high-performance memory manager, while AMD is still too afraid of their competitive advantage. This argument is basically as absurd as in the opening the specs discussion.

its sad to hear that there actually is no technical reason for such a merge. but obviously the mind change for a fully open source strategy takes a while.

[RealNC]

What would it mean for AMD to put their proprietary memory manager into the kernel tree and GPL it? Are you afraid that others would steal it? The GPL does not allow them to do that. If they would rip the memory manager they would have to open up their code too.

I'll just quote Greg Kroah-Hartman here:

The very good side effects of having your driver in the main kernel tree are:

• The quality of the driver will rise as the maintenance costs (to the original developer) will decrease.
• Other developers will add features to your driver.
• Other people will find and fix bugs in your driver.
• Other people will find tuning opportunities in your driver.
• Other people will update the driver for you when external interface changes require it.
• The driver automatically gets shipped in all Linux distributions without having to ask the distros to add it.

As Linux supports a larger number of different devices "out of the box" than any other operating system, and it supports these devices on more different processor architectures than any other operating system, this proven type of development model must be doing something right

From what you said till now, it seems that AMD does not want the open source devs to come up with a high-performance memory manager because that would cost you the competitive edge. They want a low-performing MM in the kernel while only their closed MM is fast. The conclusion is that for AMD the open source devs are an enemy.

A high-performing, in-tree MM will eventually happen. So why not go ahead right now and put the code in there anyway.

[bridgman]

I really dont want to get into a DRM debate, but I dont think Apple should be taken as an example. I'm of the opinion that Apple violated everything sacred and revered when they released OSX..... And the BSD retards let them do it.... I personally will never, ever again use another BSD based product ever for as long as I live, becouse clearly that group has no moral values.

OK, so maybe looking to Apple was a bad idea. Noted

So it is a GPL violation?

No -- a GPL violation would be taking GPL code and either publishing it under a less free license or using it to build binaries and not providing the source code. There is no legal problem AFAIK with having non-GPL code in the kernel as long as you don't claim to be GPL if you are not. If the code does not identify itself as GPL then the kernel devs are free to restrict access to certain functions deemed as "internal" but so far that seems to have been managed pretty fairly.

Not sure if there is any non-GPL code pushed into the kernel tree itself or if it is all in loadable modules; one more thing for me to learn ;(

You keep claiming that you'd lose business, but you've got no evidence to back up that claim. I'll argue that you'd significantly increase business due to the increase in stability, and uptime.

If we didn't also lose a big chunk of performance at the same time that is possible, but I don't see customers paying the same price for something that runs 20-30% slower. If you follow the IRC chatter (today in radeon is a good example) you'll see some clear signs that the current open source driver is not the foundation we want to be building on.

I've already said this, but I'll rehash it here... Intel is innovating in the linux graphics market... Not you.... Your superior hardware is already playing second fiddle. Intel is the one that is innovating GEM, not you. Intel is the one pioneering KMS, not you. Intel is the one contributing most to DRI2, not you. And the list goes on and on and on.

Sorry, isn't DRI2 more of a Red Hat initiative (Kristian H) ?

http://hoegsberg.blogspot.com/

It's also RH people doing most of the kernel modesetting work AFAIK.

http://airlied.livejournal.com/61839.html

If you follow the ML and IRC discussions GEM is seeming to be too specific to Intel HW to be a good solution for our parts, so Dave (RH) is working on a combination of GEM and TTM (Tungsten) APIs for ATI/AMD graphics. I think this is mentioned in the previous link.

Keith has been pioneering things in X for a long time and hopefully he will keep doing so. He did it at HP, at SuSE, and now he is doing it at Intel. That said, the innovations come from a lot of different companies not just Intel. I don't want to sound like I'm downplaying Intel's contribution here -- they have done a lot of good things for open source -- but if you dig deeper you may find that you are crediting Intel for work and leadership done by other people, including both independent developers and the teams at Tungsten, Red Hat and Novell.

If you actually wanted to compete, you'd drop your closed driver, you'd tell Novell to fuck off, and you'd put 100% effort into developing a cohesive and well developed ecosystem for open source development. Right now you dont have that and it doesnt look like you ever will.

Again, if someone wants to put up the money in case we lose workstation business the way we everyone expects, we can talk. The open source kernel drivers are simply not ready for commercial workstation use today.

I'm glad that your developing open source drivers, but they are built on top of Intels innovations for there inferior hardware. As such your drivers will never be as good as they should be. And it really is truly a shame.

I think we covered this above. The open source community is driven by innovations from a number of people and companies, not just Intel. Dig a little deeper, OK ?

[duby229]

I really dont want to get into a DRM debate, but I dont think Apple should be taken as an example. I'm of the opinion that Apple violated everything sacred and revered when they released OSX..... And the BSD retards let them do it.... I personally will never, ever again use another BSD based product ever for as long as I live, becouse clearly that group has no moral values.

Actually the shim code is not GPL, it's just delivered in source form.

So it is a GPL violation?

It's actually the same people on both sides. If you can reliably predict what will happen with DRM and Linux in the future then we can make more concrete plans today. In the meantime the discussion is academic because if we ported the closed 3d driver over the current kernel drivers performance would go done significantly and you would all be lining up with tomatoes anyways.

The open source kernel drivers will get better with time, and the closed source driver will probably become more open with time, and I expect this will all shake out nicely. In the meantime we need the closed driver for workstation business (unless someone wants to donate a big chunk of money to make up for the loss of business there) so our only option to avoid duplication is to cut the open source effort and I don't think anyone wants to see that.

You keep claiming that you'd lose business, but you've got no evidence to back up that claim. I'll argue that you'd significantly increase business due to the increase in stability, and uptime.

I've already said this, but I'll rehash it here... Intel is innovating in the linux graphics market... Not you.... Your superior hardware is already playing second fiddle. Intel is the one that is innovating GEM, not you. Intel is the one pioneering KMS, not you. Intel is the one contributing most to DRI2, not you. And the list goes on and on and on.

If you actually wanted to compete, you'd drop your closed driver, you'd tell Novell to fuck off, and you'd put 100% effort into developing a cohesive and well developed ecosystem for open source development. Right now you dont have that and it doesnt look like you ever will.

I'm glad that your developing open source drivers, but they are built on top of Intels innovations for there inferior hardware. As such your drivers will never be as good as they should be. And it really is truly a shame.