Re: VGA cards
On Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:12:58 -0800, Kelly Clowers wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 13:48, Camaleón wrote:
>>> So what, you want AMD to hire a bunch of devs to write a complete open
>>> source driver? They can't afford to do that.
>>
>> They couldn't do that... although they wanted.
>>
>> AMD has not released the full 3D specifications for their drivers, only
>> *partial documentation* for some of their chipsets, so even with 100
>> dedicated engineers working on ATI drivers, we still have an incomplete
>> open source driver.
>
> What? Where did you get that? 100 dedicated devs would be absurd for any
> driver, and their sure aren't that many in the case of ATI.
That "100 people" was just a "supposition", sir :-)
> There are a
> few (like 3 or 4 I think) people employed to do work on ATI drivers, I
> don't know that those are their only duties. And then there are a
> handful of people that do some work in their free time.
>
> Arguably even more than docs, a shortage of developer-hours is a major
> problem for all Xorg related work.
Just 3 or 4 people should be enough if they could get access to the full
specs for the hardware. But that is not the case.
>> >From AMD website [1]:
>>
>> ***
>> Is complete driver source code available?
(...)
> That is simple referring to their closed source drivers.
Which are the only ones having full 3D support and capabilities.
> The only thing
> I know of that has actually been held back is some of the MPEG
> acceleration stuff, since ATI implements it by licensing patents from
> MPEG-LA . AFAIK, anything else that has not been released is due to the
> docs not actually existing in a coherent form, or they are still being
> cleared by the legal department.
And do you find that a "linux-friendly" approach?
The status of the supported capabilities by "radeon" and "radeonhd"
drivers is as follows:
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/RadeonFeature
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/radeonhd%3Afeature
Does not look so good.
>> I am not seeing here nothing but the same "arguments" provided by
>> nvidia and other supposed "linux-friendly" hardware vendors out there.
>
> I don't know that anyone has called Nvidia "Linux friendly".
No, but at least nvidia clearly says what is their thinking about this.
>>> What they have done is fantastic and really about the very best that
>>> can reasonably be expected.
>>
>> Well, yes.
>>
>> But AMD could do more for its Linux users and in fact, does not :-(
>
> Yes and no? What is this, a quantum superposition?
I agree that Xorg people have done a very good job (by their own) with
radeon/radeonhd drivers.
But I have to disagree in regards AMD/ATI. It's not a linux-friendly
company and has not released the full specs for their vga cards. Just
some papers. In these days, that's not enough.
Greetings,
--
Camaleón
Reply to: