catalyst vs open source

[ossuser]

Yep, and Alex already answered it, see post 61 above

The change has (in theory at least) been tagged for stable releases so will get pulled automatically into stable kernels... it's just that 3.16 isn't one of the kernels picked for stable updates AFAIK.

That said, when I looked in the latest stable kernels I didn't actually see it, so we might want to check that it didn't get missed somehow.

That would mean that Debian Jessie/stable is not considered stable ?
Oh my, there might be a problem worldwide, then ;-)

Anyway, could you (or Alex) get me the drm_pciids.h patch for all rebranded AMD cards ?
Then I will apply for a bug report and ask the Debian kernel maintainers for a stable update.

[bridgman]

From a kernel maintainer's perspective there is "mainline", "stable", "longterm" and "everything else".

https://www.kernel.org/

Debian Jessie seems to be 3.16 based, so that would fall into the "everything else" category, aka "what's behind me, it's not important":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjGXn249Fc0

[dungeon]

Debian Jessie seems to be 3.16 based

Ubuntu 14.10 is 3.16 kernel based (maintained by Canonical currently), that is one part of the reason why Debian Jessie picked that one. Another part is that Ben Hutchings already maintain 3.2 on kernel.org.

He will continue to maintain 3.16 for Debian, after Ubuntu14.04.2 point release when Canonical plan to stop maintain it.

[ossuser]

From a kernel maintainer's perspective there is "mainline", "stable", "longterm" and "everything else".

https://www.kernel.org/

Debian Jessie seems to be 3.16 based, so that would fall into the "everything else" category, aka "what's behind me, it's not important":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjGXn249Fc0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiC4gUa3xak

[SystemCrasher]

Ubuntu 14.10 is 3.16 kernel based (maintained by Canonical currently), that is one part of the reason why Debian Jessie picked that one. Another part is that Ben Hutchings already maintain 3.2 on kernel.org.

He will continue to maintain 3.16 for Debian, after Ubuntu14.04.2 point release when Canonical plan to stop maintain it.

There is one small issue: it is really hard to tell what particular person puts into "maintenance" term. Most of time it is some security fixes and so on. It usually does not means new drivers, and only sometimes would mean backporting fixes of most daunting bugs. So to be honest, you can't really count that much on all this "LTS" mumbling. Especially when it comes to GPU drivers. From my experience it is mainline what lacks most known bugs. Though regressions would bite your for sure.

And I can assure you, Debian "stable" historically sucks very hard when it comes to opensource graphic drivers. They have sucking old MESA and ancient kernels. Tons of bugs were fixed since these prehistoric ages. Yet, Debian would rather mumble about so called "stability" and would supply some ancient shit which fails to work in many cases and works like a crap in many other cases. This is one of few real downsides of Debian. So, if one is in mood to use open graphic driver, last thing you want is MESA, LLVM and kernels which are 2 years old and so on.

Hopefully it explains why there're things like "Oibaf PPA", Dias PPA and so on (yeah, this problem could also be annoying for Ubunut, especially LTS branches).

[dungeon]

Yeah Debian stable is like an enterprise distro (RHEL, SLED... not like OpenSUSE or Fedora), but when i say Debian i mean whole Debian not just that stable release. There are old-stable, stable, testing, unstable all the time. Who wants current things should use untable as a base, i am using Debian unstable for more then decade now, there is no "being old" issues like you talk about.

Or if you want i can mention some known developer names who use Sid like AMD's Michel D?nzer or Keith Packard, etc... Even Ubuntu uses testing/unstable Debian as a base

What to say there, it is about - do user know to compile needed software or not... that Oibaf PPA for example still does not use llvm 3.7... and i tested scheduler one year ago, then in december last year, then in january when it hit 3.7... and using all the time since thern, still oibaf's ppa does not give you this

[ossuser]

...
What to say there, it is about - do user know to compile needed software or not...

After patching kernel, libdrm, xorg-radeon and mesa my system has been running more then fine on the free stack now.
All pci-id related stuff, so nothing new and using installed versions.
Not bleeding adge, but working and stable.

Using the Debian build tools was a breeze, didn't use these before.

I'm now also tempted to recompile some packages with -march native.

[SystemCrasher]

Yeah Debian stable is like an enterprise distro (RHEL, SLED... not like OpenSUSE or Fedora), but when i say Debian i mean whole Debian not just that stable release.

Debian is PITA on usual (==non-enterprise) desktop: ancient software is bad and ancient drivers make it to suck hard. Then there is testing and unstable. What is the problem with 'em? Okay, dude, I need stable working system - I'm doing some jobs for fun and profit and unexpected system failure can be costly thing for me. Sure, I have "Plan B" for most occasions but I'm really not in mood to be NASA test pilot on my PC unless I explicitly desired so. So, basically, xubuntu 15.04 is better for me at this point of time and space - it comes with recent opensource stack and if I want even more recent one - things like Oibaf or Dias PPAs are nice for sure. Yet, rest of system would be in "version freeze" for half year. Giving me about 6 month of predictable system operations. So I can plan system maintenance schedule where it not interferes my daily activities and jobs. Hard to say the same about Debian.

There are old-stable, stable, testing, unstable all the time. Who wants current things should use untable as a base, i am using Debian unstable for more then decade now, there is no "being old" issues like you talk about.

Sure, here they are. But everything more recent than stable turns you into NASA test pilot and system wreckage is more or less expected since software versions are no longer locked and it is really depends if new program version with major uplift happens to be compatible with older version. Things can easily fall apart and one have to be ready for it. Not what I want on my production systems I use for jobs, etc. Sure, one can do fine-grained version control using package manager but it puts too much burden on admin to my taste.

Or if you want i can mention some known developer names who use Sid like AMD's Michel D?nzer or Keith Packard, etc... Even Ubuntu uses testing/unstable Debian as a base

Sure. Debian is great "base" to start on. But it's not great as "usual desktop" unless someone (like Ubuntu team) ready to deal with mentioned sharp edges. And it's not like if I want to re-do what Ubuntu teams do myself, single-handed.

What to say there, it is about - do user know to compile needed software or not... that Oibaf PPA for example still does not use llvm 3.7... and i tested scheduler one year ago, then in december last year, then in january when it hit 3.7... and using all the time since thern, still oibaf's ppa does not give you this

Well, world is not perfect . Yet, there is Dias PPA for recent ubuntu. So if you're okay with risk of breaking things (LLVM is a bit more than just part of gfx drivers, its also part of clang toolchain and chance of breaking compiler toolchain in alive production system could be not the best idea ever, granted it could be used for some other jobs, so it takes some degree of caution to update...). And TBH, things like MESA are real mess when it comes to recompiling it. In fact it is rather complicated process which requires some familiarity with graphic stack. Not the easiest thing to compile yourself.

[brosis]

Debian Testing is perfectly good platform, best to day. When will Ubuntu be rolling? The power of apt/dpkg gives an unsurpassed fire and forget system, that automatically deals with almost any type of upgrade problems. Using newer kernel, like Liquorix, is an option if newer kernel features are required. The only Debian weakness is really absence of 4-way configuration auto resolver. It is a great base to start, continue and finish.

[dungeon]

AFAIR Debian testing was introduced back in 2001., i have feeling that some people seems to don't know it exist even today. That was 3 years before Ubuntu appear... and Ubuntu appear because of 6 months cadence introduced on major software back then like Gnome. Red Hat abandoned Red Hat Linux and introduced Fedora with then same 6 months cadence, year after that Ubuntu appear and year after that we got OpenSUSE.