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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


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