Valve Begins Publicly Tracking AMD Catalyst Linux Issues

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Valve Begins Publicly Tracking AMD Catalyst Linux Issues

Valve's Pierre-Loup A. Griffais has begun publicly listing known issues with AMD's Catalyst Linux graphics support...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTc5MDI

[darkbasic]

Poor devs, it will become a loooong list

[peppercats]

Issue #1: it sucks

[Filiprino]

Issue #1: It's crap.
Issue #2: It's closed source.
Issue #3: It will never receive bug fixes in time.

[vivo]

Issue #1: it sucks

Issue #1 closed. Running the same test triggers a different bug every time, giving varying levels of suckiness.

[dungeon]

Issue #2: It's closed source.

Issue #2: Closed. Fill that bug for all games on Steam

Issue #3: It will never receive bug fixes in time.

Issue #3: YMMV, closed by Albert Einstein

[Filiprino]

A game is closed source but at least it doesn't do anything at kernel space.

[dungeon]

A game is closed source but at least it doesn't do anything at kernel space.

That is security issue then, opensource radeon driver uses closed source firmwares

[gigaplex]

That is security issue then, opensource radeon driver uses closed source firmwares

How many complex devices that need firmware actually have open source firmware?

[System25]

That is security issue then, opensource radeon driver uses closed source firmwares

And your hard drive uses firmware. And monitor. And mouse. And so on. So it basically comes to the question what if could do. GPU lacks network connectivity and in modern systems if it would try something nasty like DMA to unrequested space, IOMMU would engage and illegal access will be caught. Can be an issue on old systems without IOMMU though. However, its not like if relatively small firmware can hold logic to patch arbitrary system. So I guess this problem is limited and not fundamentally worse than, say, HDD firmware (which haves all chances to return you wrong sector, potentially hijacking execution flow of kernel or application).