Radeon vs. RadeonHD Fighting Continues

[sundown]

sundown, if you're using EXA with RadeonHD, you'll need to enable Option "DRI" aswell for now.

You were right. I added that as an option and it worked. But I can visibly tell that radeon outperformed radeonhd when I turned compiz on. Besides radeon+glxgears has 2-3 times more FPS than radeonhd+glxgears.

[energyman]

'duplicate drivers' are just a reality. Look at the kernel. There are TONS of duplicate drivers. Old, trusted, stable, versus new, feature richer, different cards of the same class.

But the real evil thing was the SILENT drop. Mr Stone just dropped rhd without informing anybody.

That is just low.

[hmmm]

:S I think it's definately news-worthy, albeit with a poor selection of words. Sensationalising a discussion with strong opinions into a "good old argument and flaming" seems a bit too far...

[MostAwesomeDude]

Okay, let's clear up a few things.

1) radeonhd is *not* being "dropped from X.org". It's only been removed from a build script. It's still hosted on the same git repos, still has the same web space and wiki pages.

2) While a lot of radeon developers (including me) feel that radeonhd is duplicated effort and does not bring anything interesting to the table, that does not mean that we are doing anything to sabotage their efforts, and in fact, radeonhd's internal 3D engine acceleration (EXA, Xv) is based directly on radeon's 3D engine code. Saying that radeon developers are trying to quash radeonhd is just silly. (Not to mention that nearly all of us are on both #radeon and #radeonhd on Freenode.)

3) Much of the code that used to be in DDX drivers has moved out of those codebases, and into separate projects. All OpenGL stuff is in Mesa, most modesetting has been ported to KMS (although KMS won't be mainlined for a bit...) Fussing about differences between the two drivers is going to become increasingly pointless.

4) There's no forking going on. Pure and simple.

~ C.

[yoshi314]

sad but true...but what can we do about it? i can't point a gun to the X devs so that they include the driver again :-D

but you can take the code and change it.

[seba]

sad but true...but what can we do about it? i can't point a gun to the X devs so that they include the driver again :-D

[deanjo]

however xorg developers have the right to not include any code they don't want or like if they decide to do so. if you don't like it you can start your own xserver.

Which at that point you might as well be using the blobs since that is basically what they are doing. 12 months down the road another foss attempt drama unfolds and then spins another offshoot, all at the same time and nobody is excelling, I can't blame Nvidia for keeping their blob, at least they can hold themselves accountable for issues and resolve them without having to endure a bloody soap opera.

[seba]

choices and freedom this is what FOSS is all about.
imho even if all the developers worked together they wouldn't do a good job because they wouldn't get alone well, different philosophies, egos, etc that's why many people work on the same project but from different angles.

they shouldn't had drop the radeonhd driver like that; they should have at least inform the developers not because they have to, but just for respect to the radeonhd developers.

however xorg developers have the right to not include any code they don't want or like if they decide to do so. if you don't like it you can start your own xserver.

[he_the_great]

And the natural first question to that that pops into everybody's mind is "Why?"

Maybe you haven't been around long enough to remember how politics wound up forking XFree86 and what a fun time that was.

I think Louise's point is that the article shouldn't have been posted at all because it wasn't about technical changes related to Linux. In some ways agree, but bickering ins a part of Linux and I suppose deserves some recognition. I feel the title was appropriate, I know it is not related to technical information. I don't know why he bothered reading the article, other than to find out what the fight is about.

[DanL]

RadeonHD should die ...

Why? No one's making you use it and the whole point of GNU/Linux is software freedom.

The radeonHD driver is better than radeon IMHO. As a radeonhd user, I appreciate the clean code, and the fact that the devs have never made building Mesa and X.org from git source as a requirement to use the latest driver (I'm not sure if it's currently a requirement for radeon, but it was at one time).