Nouveau Developer Working On OpenGL Extension To Help With Reverse-Engineering

[duby229]

I don't have the time or care to appease you. I don't have 2 matching monitors to test with. I had problems with the AMD card, not the Nvidia card. I like how my Nvidia card looks. I'm happy with it. As I said, it looks better -to me-. Why do you care if I prefer Nvidia? I'm sure the vast majority of the tech community, not Linux, but gamers, developers, IT, etc, would prefer an RTX 2080 over an rx 570 also, not that it matters, because -I- prefer it.

But, btw, tried a simple google search, and I'm by far not the only person having issues with the AMD rx 570 and Linux.
https://www.google.com/search?q=amd%...20issues&cad=h

It's almost like you're putting your hands over your eyes and saying, "I can't see you!" While stomping you feet and yelling out, "la la la la la lal!"

EDIT: Linux definitely isn't perfect and some cards -are- better supported than others, this has always been true on linux, same now as it was two decades ago. That rx570 card was known to be buggy at the firmware the first week it was released, you would have known that if you had just followed you senses and googled first before you bought it.

It's not news, you have to buy -ALREADY- well supported hardware for linux. It's just the way it is. If you had bought a 480 or a 280 instead, you'd have a near perfect experience with -zero- installation effort.

EDIT: Exactly the same thing is true for -any- hardware purchases, wifi, ethernet, tuners, encoders, anything..... You -MUST- choose hardware that already has working support at the time of your purchase. This is not news, it's been this way on linux from the very beginning.

[skeetre]

Oh I agree with researching the hardware before purchasing, especially if you want a seamless Linux experience. But you said

I don't understand how you could have any trouble with an AMD card, you install the card, you boot -any- linux distro and -BOOM-, it just works

I didn't buy it for Linux, I bought because a coworker was selling it cheap and I thought it would be a better card for my son for gaming. He asked me to put his old video card back in, which was a much older Nvidia GTX 470. And since he didn't want the AMD card, I tried it out on my Linux box, because so many people were saying how great AMD is on Linux now.

But either way, at this point, I'm definitely not going out and buying even more hardware, I'm using what I have, and again, quite happy with the hardware I have.

I did find the 4th search result down on that list funny.

Is there any solution or should I replace the card with an Nvidia one?

and the response he got was

Nvidia usually has better Linux support, so, yes, replace it. – mikewhatever

And that was just a few weeks ago.

And since the rx 570 came out several years ago, I expected it to "just work" on any Linux distro I threw at it. I think I tried Fedora 29 and Mint 19.1 and just didn't have much luck with it. Anyway, I do understand where you're coming from that you are about meeting standards and code compliancy. As far as which looks better, that's opinion, and yeah, maybe 80% of people feel that AMD looks better, /shrug. This topic was supposed to be about Nouveau and an OpenGL extension, not AMD VS Nvidia, so I'm done since I have no input on that actual topic. Thanks for the discussion about AMD and Nvidia cards.

[duby229]

Oh I agree with researching the hardware before purchasing, especially if you want a seamless Linux experience. But you said I didn't buy it for Linux, I bought because a coworker was selling it cheap and I thought it would be a better card for my son for gaming. He asked me to put his old video card back in, which was a much older Nvidia GTX 470. And since he didn't want the AMD card, I tried it out on my Linux box, because so many people were saying how great AMD is on Linux now.

But either way, at this point, I'm definitely not going out and buying even more hardware, I'm using what I have, and again, quite happy with the hardware I have.

I did find the 4th search result down on that list funny. and the response he got was And that was just a few weeks ago.

And since the rx 570 came out several years ago, I expected it to "just work" on any Linux distro I threw at it. I think I tried Fedora 29 and Mint 19.1 and just didn't have much luck with it. Anyway, I do understand where you're coming from that you are about meeting standards and code compliancy. As far as which looks better, that's opinion, and yeah, maybe 80% of people feel that AMD looks better, /shrug. This topic was supposed to be about Nouveau and an OpenGL extension, not AMD VS Nvidia, so I'm done since I have no input on that actual topic. Thanks for the discussion about AMD and Nvidia cards.

No that was just another misinformed fanboy. Buy what works and if you don't then it's squarely your fault... If you are unwilling to perform a side by side comparison then you will never know the truth about what works best and you will be stuck using hardware that you have that isn't well suited to your needs. That's ok too, but....

GPU hardware gets fabricated and some have bugs in the design, even nvidia hardware, in the case of the 570 those bugs are manifest in its firmware. It was figured out the very first week of its release. You would have known that if you had googled it. You -MUST- buy hardware that already works. THe 570 never did due to a buggy design, those bugs could potentially be worked around, but they can't be fixed, those bugs were fabricated into the hardware.

I think this is clearly a case of misinformation and the desire to be misinformed....

[skeetre]

I can't find any reference to a firmware bug in the rx 570, can you point me to a link?

[skeetre]

You have not bought anything new. No manufacturer has resources to test everything.

What the heck are you talking about?
He said

You would have known that if you had googled it.

so I googled it to see what I would have found had I googled before buying it... and I can't find anything about faulty firmware or anything that would have said stay away from this card and get something else.

[ssokolow]

The work-around is don't use twinview, use zaphod instead. Not sure if that's still an option though.... Last time a tried zaphod it didn't work with the OSS drivers....

EDIT: The first monitor is usually defined as "Screen0", but really that's just a variable name which you can change to whatever you want.

I've been using multi-monitor Linux since before TwinView was a thing. If I wanted the limitations of Zaphod mode, I'd be using it already. (My first dual-head setup was a 1.2GHz Celeron with a couple of CRTs hanging off an ATi Rage 128 in the AGP slot and a Voodoo 3 3000 in one of the PCI slots.)

[duby229]

I can't find any reference to a firmware bug in the rx 570, can you point me to a link?

Sorry, been busy....

I suppose I could google for more information, but I had read about problems with that card right here on Phoronix shortly after it was launched so I never even considered it. I'm still using a 280x right now due to the fact that it's working so flawlessly, I just have no need to upgrade. Generally speaking you want to buy the same hardware the drivers devs use to program the driver on, at the time I bought this card the devs were developing radeonsi on this card.

There are dozens of places where info can be had, you just have to troll through it and interpret it. The internets a big place, start here or reddit or check the mailing lists for the OSS drivers and mesa. Plenty of pro's to talk to to get advice and plenty of rants already made to read thru....

[duby229]

I've been using multi-monitor Linux since before TwinView was a thing. If I wanted the limitations of Zaphod mode, I'd be using it already. (My first dual-head setup was a 1.2GHz Celeron with a couple of CRTs hanging off an ATi Rage 128 in the AGP slot and a Voodoo 3 3000 in one of the PCI slots.)

The only true limitation of zaphod mode is that you can't drag windows between screens. That's it. In every single other way it is so far superior to twinview it's just ridiculous.

EDIT: OT, actually if someone could implement a buffering system that would allow zaphod heads to drag windows between screens, then that is the infrastructure required to get SLI/CF to share data in a way that AFR could be implemented correctly. Zaphod just needs another layer of abstraction, that's it and then other problems can be solved too. Its a plus and a plus. Somebody just needs to do it.

[ssokolow]

The only true limitation of zaphod mode is that you can't drag windows between screens.

Bingo. Despite all the games I collect, I still spend more time multitasking in ways that Zaphod would be a major pain for.

I wouldn't want to have to rewrite every application on my desktop except my games just to reinvent transferring windows between monitors when I can instead use Wine's virtual desktop or Xephyr or an LD_PRELOAD hook to fix specific games.

EDIT: OT, actually if someone could implement a buffering system that would allow zaphod heads to drag windows between screens, then that is the infrastructure required to get SLI/CF to share data in a way that AFR could be implemented correctly. Zaphod just needs another layer of abstraction, that's it and then other problems can be solved too. Its a plus and a plus. Somebody just needs to do it.

They did. They called it Xinerama. Why do you think it was well-documented that Xinerama had a performance cost in the era before drivers started providing hardware acceleration options like TwinView? (That was the original reason I stuck with nVidia for so long. They were the only option that gave me accelerated Xinerama with good drivers.)

If you don't have cooperation from applications (either knowing that they're being kept in the dark, like with Wayland, or knowing about Xinerama info in X11), then you get weird, random breakages. As the Servo developers recently blogged about, it's inevitable that any complex codebase will accidentally treat consistent but unspecified behaviours as if they were specified.

Hell, it's bad enough that, for ages, the YouTube player would fullscreen to a single monitor but draw itself with the expectation of filling the entire desktop.

Another good example is the game Dungeons of Dredmor, where, if you don't use some kind of workaround, it'll force you to pick a valid fullscreen resolution as your windowed resolution, which makes it more or less unplayable if, like me, you've used nVidia's MetaModes option to lock your desktop resolution because, whenever a game changes the resolution, it confuses the window manager's "keep windows on screen when changing resolutions permanently" code into trashing the window layout.

(That's actually one of the reasons I'm looking forward to Wayland once they've re-created all the functionality I rely on. A clear separation between the privileged "change resolution permanently" operation which should trigger window re-layout and the un-privileged "change resolution for the lifetime of this window" operation that XWayland will have to rely on.)