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X Server 1.11 Breaks The Video Driver ABI

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  • #11
    Originally posted by V!NCENT View Post
    Just update the freaking driver code and recompile, AMD and nVidia....
    nvidia does this. You can often run their driver with the ignoreabi and it works. Obviously you have to wait for them to release a driver after the change is made so it's not like it works on day one, but it's not the endless wait you're implying.

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    • #12
      Originally posted by V!NCENT View Post
      Just update the freaking driver code and recompile, AMD and nVidia....

      Wayland is compatible with nothing at this time and if X.org can't even change such a minor problem than you can bet your X.org ass that Canonical is going to ship Wayland a lot sooner (they said they'd ditch the proprietary drivers whenever FLOSS becomes useful enough for them).

      And you know what time it is when Ubuntu starts changing...
      It's not a Just.

      There are at least two angles worth examining here..

      o Many versions - The drivers interact with a number of different ABIs, and of those ABIs there are historical versions as well. When an ABI changes, then the glue that handles the ABI needs to change and be made compatible whilst maintaining compatibility with the older versions. I assume that Just compiling against the new ABI and breaking previous versions of X isn't acceptable either.

      o Development Pipeline Commercial development pipelines by default have a depth of active projects at any given time. Sometimes you can inject a new project part way though a cycle if the return is high, the risk of the change is low and the effort is small. If you begin to fail against any of those criteria, you begin to move further back up the pipeline.

      Just is usually a facade over a number of complex issues.

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      • #13
        Originally posted by Phoronix
        "While the open-source drivers are quick to adopt to major version changes of the X Server,"
        ...the proprietary drivers are quick to use all card features and sqeeze all performance.

        So, whats gonna be? Better version or better performance?

        this literally sucks...

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        • #14
          Originally posted by crazycheese View Post
          ...the proprietary drivers are quick to use all card features and sqeeze all performance.

          So, whats gonna be? Better version or better performance?

          this literally sucks...
          Well at most i wait a week for nvidia to release. Most of the time i can simply use ignoreabi and it works anyways.

          Now I've avoided AMD/ATI since... PCI mach64s were the new hawtness, but it hasn't seemed to get any better on that side of the fence. I'd love to use the opensource drivers, but they still don't work well enough for WoW under WINE.

          Also most linux uses will be rather unaffected by this unless they go out of their way to install the new xserver, as most distros will wait to push 1.11 until the closed ones catch up, or the next release cycle.

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          • #15
            Why Radeon driver is never affected by this?

            I mean, unlike Catalyst, R600g Radeon driver on my Radeon HD 4550 always works. Moved to it with the release of Mesa 7.10, dumping Catalyst completely and now using Mesa 7.11-devel which has S3TC texture compression support. Can run Doom 3 in Wine at a playable framerate, Compiz, KWin effects works flawlessly.

            In my opinion, Radeon driver is better than Catalyst in terms of stability and support for new X server and kernels. No glitches with Firefox in hardware-accelerated mode, Gnome 3 works very well with it. The only drawback is performance.

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            • #16
              So....people are worrying about an ABI break for something slated to be released in August. We'll say 3 months away. Ok. For all the bias against AMD, I don't think their devs will be just sitting idle for 3 months, and neither will nvidia's. Lots of hype over absolutely nothing.

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              • #17
                Originally posted by mirv View Post
                So....people are worrying about an ABI break for something slated to be released in August. We'll say 3 months away. Ok. For all the bias against AMD, I don't think their devs will be just sitting idle for 3 months, and neither will nvidia's. Lots of hype over absolutely nothing.
                Who says that this will be the only issue with X server? New kernel release may also break things up for these graphics drivers.

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                • #18
                  Originally posted by Reloaded211 View Post
                  Who says that this will be the only issue with X server? New kernel release may also break things up for these graphics drivers.
                  Doesn't what you're saying boil down to: "Unreleased driver may be incompatible with unreleased X server and unreleased kernel."

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                  • #19
                    Originally posted by archibald View Post
                    Doesn't what you're saying boil down to: "Unreleased driver may be incompatible with unreleased X server and unreleased kernel."
                    You can say it even shorter: "The next release of Fedora". As long as I've used Fedora, new releases are *always* incompatible with Catalyst , reasons mainly being newest kernel and/or newest (sometimes even beta) X server. Had to use Radeon driver until AMD caught up with Catalyst. Considering that year ago Radeon driver was barely usable, this wasn't a pleasant option. The aforementioned reasons are why I switched to Arch linux.

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                    • #20
                      Yeah, right...

                      Originally posted by macemoneta View Post
                      "...for those using the proprietary graphics drivers... you may be stuck waiting a couple of months for support."
                      I suppose that should be phrased as "... developers of X might be stuck waiting a couple of months for users."

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