Camaleón wrote:
On Tue, 15 Dec 2009 15:28:19 -0800, Kelly Clowers wrote:On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 14:39, Camaleón wrote:That "100 people" was just a "supposition", sir :-)Hmmm, then that sentence needs some qualifiers or something: "so even *if we had* 100 dedicated engineers working on ATI drivers, we *would* still have an incomplete open source driver." Which probably isn't true anyway, with that much in the way of resources, you could reverse engineer it in short enough order."Reverse engineering" is not legal in some countries and it's not a fair approach when we are speaking about a company (AMD/ATI) that you are naming it as "linux-friendly".Hey, we have the docs and specs, why should we need reverse engineer it at all? >:-)
Why are you trolling about this? Go troll on some other list.The ATI people have been great, but they have stated from the outset that some aspects of their closed source driver cannot be opened due to legal issues. The vast majority of the features of their devices, though, are covered by the documentation they have released. In addition, they have also released examples of working source code and they have several _paid_ employees working on the open source drivers and documentation.
Your whining is idiotic trolling.
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 very familiar with those pages. There is still more work to do of course, but all in all, it looks like very good progress.And you don't bother why AMD/ATI (being a "linux-friendy" company) does not provides these drivers?If I were AMD/ATI, I will like to see at the same level of quality and performance *any* of the drivers I am providing to my users, being windows, linux, *bsd or solaris users.
It's one thing to criticize the quality of the drivers: 'fglrx' has always been an insult to Linux users, IMO. But it's another thing to claim that the status of the open source drivers is poor, or that ATI is somehow to blame for the drivers not being perfect already.
The documentation on started being released a couple of years ago, and the drivers written with it have been written from scratch since that time. Not all of the docs were released at the same time, so support for those aspects should be expected to be delayed... by anyone who lives in the real world, anyway. (Maybe not by a useless troll who is unable to figure out simple things like this.)
I agree that Xorg people have done a very good job (by their own) with radeon/radeonhd drivers.I wasn't speaking of the independent xorg devs (although they also do a good job), I was saying AMD is doing a very good job.In what way is doing a very good job? A good job could be if they collaborate a bit for the development of their drivers, not just by providing "some" specs and letting other doing its job.
Pure trolling.Anyone familiar with the development of these drivers knows that AMD/ATI employees are working on this everyday. They respond to comments and questions from users, work on development of the drivers (and related components of the graphics subsystems), and work with other developers to improve all of this software.
Your comments merely reveal your ignorance.
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.Just some papers? What else would they release? What specifically do you think they need to release?They need to release the drivers. They need to open source the full drivers to their users. By "they" I mean AMD/ATI, of course, not X.org.
The only "drivers" they could have "released" was 'fglrx'. They have always stated that they cannot: intellectual property from other parties prevents them from legally releasing that code.
(One may choose to disbelieve them, since we cannot see the code. That is a different question, however.)
Instead, AMD/ATI began releasing documentation and example code. As I said in a previous message in this thread: within 6 months the open source drivers were doing video playback more reliably than years of development on 'fglrx' had provided for most Linux users.
Look at the r600 docs for example: a 342 page Instruction Set Architecture guide, a 43 page 3D acceleration guide, a 166 page 3D register guide and sample code for manipulating the atom command processor.Look at its current status: http://jbridgman.livejournal.com/945.html"(...) The 6xx/7xx 3D driver is starting to do useful things again after moving over to the radeon-rewrite mesa code base. As of last night, it seems to be behaving properly on 14 of the 63 tests in progs/redbook, drawing incorrectly on 24, and either not drawing or crashing on the remaining 25. Cooper found that the following tests rendered correctly :"Get real. People expect more for their vga card than just "starts to do useful things" and "behaving properly on 14 of the 63 tests". They need a card does works 100% :-)
More idiocy. More trolling.That "current status" was from _JULY_, about half a year ago. In my earlier message in this thread, I pointed out that I own a Radeon HD 4850 (RV770) which requires this "r600" support, and it is rapidly improving. For me, the only bugs remaining are in Mesa -- and apparently were introduced by some wild commits in August that need to be reviewed (and either reverted or rewritten).
I believe those bugs can be cleared up before the end of the year, and when that happens I will have perfectly functional 2D/3D acceleration on a fairly high end GPU. This was unimaginable for Linux using open source drivers even at the beginning of this year.
For older cards, perfect (or nearly so) support was already in place quite a while ago.
At this point I'd like to ask Kelly Clowers to stop feeding the troll. The only result of your attempts to correct this troll's errors has been to give it a chance to spread disinformation in the debian-user archives. Now Google will find this crap, and people will be led to believe that open source support for ATI hardware was still unreliable as late as December 2009 -- which is categorically false.
DW