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The letter that started AMD's Open-Source Strategy
- zokier 15y agoI find the ATi/AMD FOSS driver story bit sad, considering the state of the drivers today. I feel that the community kinda betrayed AMD there by not managing to create high quality drivers even when given the docs they had craved for so long. I remember the discussions on /. and elsewhere before this; "Just give us the docs, and we'll write the drivers".
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- sliverstorm 15y agoIt's a good story to reference when the FOSS community decrys a closed-source vendor, unable to understand why they do not wish to cooperate. Just like any other organization the FOSS community has a reputation. If we desire action, we need to cultivate a positive one. A track record of successful opening abd development of closed source would really help cracking some of the other closed-source nuts.
- MostAwesomeDude 15y agoHi, I was one of the amateur community members that created drivers after the AMD documentation drops started. Could you explain exactly what you feel is not high-quality about the drivers we've written?
- wmf 15y agoAren't the Linux drivers much later and much slower than AMD's Windows drivers?
- MostAwesomeDude 15y agoThe kernel part of the Linux drivers is written as soon as the developers get hardware from AMD. There are currently a half-dozen AMD employees working on this, as well as a few non-AMD people, and generally, hardware support has been pretty concomitant with general releases of the hardware. "Slower" really depends on what you're doing. If you're doing lots of 2D stuff, then no, not by a long shot; the open drivers are generally very speedy for 2D stuff. If you're doing 3D stuff, then the raw framerates might be slower for games, but as a general rule, nobody's paid to make open drivers as fast as possible, only fast enough to run well. There's also a bit of disconnect between blessed AMD drivers and OEM drivers for Windows; there's known hardware which has never been supported by the AMD Windows drivers but works fine in Linux under the open driver stack. "Later" is kind of a loaded term; if you buy an AGP HD 2400 with a PCIe-to-AGP bridge, it has immediate Windows support, from the OEM, but with no updates and no upgrade path. Linux support lagged for that chipset by about four-six months but continues today, with updates and fixes. So, tl;dr: It varies so much that this question ends up being loaded.
- obtino 15y agoThe AMD drivers on Linux are absolutely pathetic when used with Xinerama! I've had to give up on Linux on desktop due to this. I've had nVidia cards in the past and they have worked much better on a multi-monitor environment than my current ATI ones.
- MostAwesomeDude 15y agoXinerama disables acceleration. There's been a decade of discussion on this, but no good solutions have been discovered yet. If you want accelerated multi-card X, use one screen per card; this means that you can't move windows between cards. If you want accelerated multi-monitor X on one card, use Xrandr instead of Xinerama.
- mariuolo 15y agoIn other words: four years and they still suck.