Open-Source 2D, 3D Drivers For ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series 245
An anonymous reader writes "AMD has now rolled out open-source 2D and 3D drivers for their ATI Radeon HD 5000 series graphics processors. As described at length over at Phoronix, it's taken nearly a year to complete but there is now public code released that enables 2D, 3D, and video hardware-acceleration for this latest generation of ATI GPUs. For now this code is intended for developers and enthusiasts but with time it will make its way into stable Linux distribution updates. AMD's open-source developers are also beginning to work on ATI Radeon HD 6000 series support, which is hardware not to be released until late in the year."
Re:Doesn't help with all the older cards. (Score:3, Insightful)
Did the problems you experienced with ATI cards on Linux occur with the Open Source driver, or did you (oh-so-mistakenly) believe "propietary = better" and tried the steaming pile of trash that's the Closed Source ones?
ATI & Linux: Confusing as always (Score:4, Insightful)
These days, I pretty much only buy motherboards with intel graphics, simply because I don't want to have to deal with the hassle of installing NVidia's closed drivers, and for the life of me I can't figure out what I am supposed to do with an ATI card. There seems to be half a dozen open source driver projects always on the go, with no clear indication of what cards work and what cards don't. Add to that the constant complaints I see over their own closed source drivers, and that's another brand I simply won't consider. Someone tell me I'm wrong and point me to something that can clarify the situation.
Now for your part (Score:5, Insightful)
Go out and buy some. And then help to make the driver rock-solid, if you're capable.
We've got to reward the companies that do this.
Bruce
Re:No thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
You're reading far too much into Bruce's statement.
If buying ATI cards because of their improved performance encourages ATI to make a greater investment in open source drivers, which in turn further improves features and performance, how is this is any way NOT pragmatic?
There may be such a thing as open source zealotry, but, when they choose it, the vast majority of people choose FOSS because it's better than the alternatives.
Lastly, accusing Bruce Perens, of all people, of zealotry is not a great way to impress us with your perspicacity.
Re:Doesn't help with all the older cards. (Score:3, Insightful)
I have no qualms with the second half of your statement, but there's no denying that the R100 is old. Really old in computing terms. Just because there exist EVEN OLDER chipsets still in use doesn't negate that fact. It'd be like saying that a 486 isn't slow because you can find a 286 still in use. It might be slowER, but the 486 is still slow too.
No "No thanks", thanks. (Score:4, Insightful)
There are many issues in the world that can best be solved by people being nothing like you.
Simply put: If the consumer doesn't reward good deeds, business (with it's legal obligation to maximize profit) won't do as many good deeds.
In this case, your pragmatism, along with that of millions of others, is partly to blame for closed source drivers are so common. You yourself probably have lower quality graphics or operating system functionality due to this.
While it's fine to be pragmatic in many circumstances, your stance that buying on principle isn't morally above buying through total pragmatism is, IMO, ultimately harmful.
Blood diamonds are an extreme example of what comes from mass pragmatism. Would you knowingly buy one it it was better value?
Re:No thanks (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:No thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
Working vendor supported FOSS drivers are useful as the abilities to repair, improve, share and modify the drivers are all of considerable utility to the graphics card using community (even if not to one particular person in it). I do agree that the drivers should be at least servicable before anyone should buy a product. But servicable is all they need to be to be useful now.
--sabre86
Re:nVidia (Score:4, Insightful)
Why? Unless the resulting drivers are actually better which remains to be seen, just the fact that they are open source is meaningless.
Now if someone can fix ATIs shitty OpenGL support, then I'd be all over it. But for right now this makes no difference.
How deep is your vision? (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks for the kind words. What I find in general is that those who feel this is simply a matter of doctrinal rigidity are only interested in solving today's problem, without much vision toward what their lot might be tomorrow. Working to improve your own future is hardly zealotry.
Obviously it makes sense to decrease the degree to which we must be supplicants of a hardware vendor. That's even more true when the hardware vendor is in an essentially unchallenged duopoly. A vendor is working in our interest when they help us to free ourselves from the need to go to them to fix bugs, add functionality, and support our devices through software and hardware changes. When a vendor doesn't do this, we live constantly under the threat of withdrawl of support.
Rewarding vendors who do less will make it more certain that we'll get less in the future.
This all sounds eminently pragmatic to me.
Imaginary? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
You'll find out how "imaginary" it is when your refusal to financially support the people doing the work causes them to stop doing it.
See, that's the huge fallacy with the argument that intellectual property has no owner, and therefore no financial value to any entity as it should be distributed without recompense: People generally do work because they are motivated. Things like houses, sending the kids to college, paying the water bill, buying the occasional gratuitous item -- if you take months of work and don't return something (and I'm not talking about a pat on the back), eventually, people will begin to ask themselves, "So... why did I do this again? I could have been working at McDonald's and paying off my house."
I will grant you it is easy to take work without recompense - particularly software, ideas, and performance recordings - especially since digital transfer has become so easy of itself; but I put it to you that your mindset is going to either kill the golden goose, or mutate it into something you're *really* not going to like. I don't think there's even a ghost of a chance you're going to see a transition into a Soviet-style "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need"; and that's the *only* type of society where your idea of "imaginary property" translates into something sensible: property that isn't so much imaginary, but owned equally by all.
Re:nVidia (Score:3, Insightful)
Until this can match the performance of the NVIDIA VDPAU I'm not interested. I need performance and functionality. So far ATI hasn't delivered that and while this is a step forward it's a bit late in the game. Wake me when they do something like the ION chipset that NVIDIA has done so I can have high performance video decoding and rendering on a low power CPU. If they had done this say two years ago or had better performing closed source drivers I might have chosen to use their stuff. They are way late to this party...
Here is your benefit (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't care if something is open source or not unless that gives me a benefit.
The benefit is: If it crashes, you can do something about it.
You have the source. You can compile it yourself. If it doesn't work the way you'd like, you can change it.
With open source, you have many eyes looking at the code. If there is a subtle bug it will more easily be found by 10,000 people looking at it rather than 10 or 20.
That's your benefit right there.
Re:Now for your part (Score:2, Insightful)
But how does ATI know that you bought an ATI card because of the open-source drivers?
Because of the email I will send them telling them why. The same way banks I chose not to use for this reason heard about it that way when most bank websites still couldn't be accessed from linux.
Re:Here is your benefit (Score:3, Insightful)
Let see if others can write more benefits.
Re:Here is your benefit (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, but the glacial pace at which Gallium3D and its drivers advance is a testimony to how hard it must be to write a graphics driver. If it was a job for your average programmer, the guys working on this stuff would have given us functional drivers two years ago. At this pace you'll be able to enjoy stable and fast R700 hardware support another 3 years from now.
In the future, when those drivers are done, they will surely be benefits to them being open source. But the only actual benefit now would be if some ingenious hacker got involved, committed and wrote the drivers in a couple months. Currently the development model isn't working very efficiently, because R600 docs were released over 2 years ago and we're only beginning to see functional drivers.
Open source works better when the barrier to involvement is lower, OpenGL infrastructure is more complex than most kernel drivers. It requires:
* knowing the OpenGL API intimately
* a firm grasp of 3D math and rasterization process
* an idea how to manage non-uniform memory and do low level hardware access in a thread-safe way
* a fair bit of compiler design for compiling shaders to GPU instructions
* all of the above done in C, because we still haven't developed a better language for low level work (see this paper [usenix.org] for things a driver design language could have)
Re:nVidia (Score:5, Insightful)
The binary driver they produce which you cannot fix if it breaks, and neither can your distro maintainers... you are at the absolute mercy of nvidia for bugfixes...
The binary driver that only supports x86/amd64 (so no putting your card in a small arm based media player for instance)
The binary driver that only works with certain versions of X (ie you can't upgrade until nvidia let you)
The binary driver that only works with certain kernel versions (ie you can't upgrade until nvidia let you)
The binary driver that will sooner or later drop support for your card, leaving you tied to an old X and kernel version.
I'd rather not have a binary driver... You are far too dependent on a single entity, who would rather sell you a new card even if the old one is still perfectly adequate for your needs.
Re:Imaginary? Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Imaginary? Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:nVidia (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's be honest - if I find a bug in some Linux software, it won't get fixed. I won't fix it, and I've tried reporting bugs in the past and they don't get fixed either.
This card "just works" - it provides great performance for QuakeLive which is just about all I play, and I on my quad core 64bit Unbuntu distro the deskstop is hardly sluggish either. Yes, I'd prefer it if all the source were available, but it's not. If I had any problems I could try using one of the open source driver projects, but I don't have the need just yet, and by all accounts performance is not up there with the evil binaries.
Re:Here is your benefit (Score:1, Insightful)
Sorry I must disagree, it's not that _I_ can do something about it it's I really can't code for GPU and very few can.
It's about someone else willing to correct the crash instead of me and in a timely manner and with current kernel versions, this happen for the opensource radeon drievers, it does not for that other crap which someone still call drivers.
Re:Excellent (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, those specific bits are only part of the impact that DRM has. They also have to protect all the underlying systems too, like memory management. They can't release an implementation that would easily let people find:
1. Allocating memory for compressed frame
2. [magic loading frame]
3. Allocating memory for uncompressed frame
4. [magic decoding frame]
If they did, people could easily grab those from GPU memory. Also, part is not handled by UVD hardware but rather by shaders, so while we have the instruction set they will not give us their exact internal format for shader programs. Because if they did, we could find where and how it's being called and grab the frames from there. And even such things as basic DVI/HDMI output, they have to be very careful to teach us how to output an image, but not capture any HDCP protected frames while they're being output.
DRM is not just one walled off area with "here be dragons". It's a poison all over the system that makes it really, really hard for AMD to be open about anything.
Re:Imaginary? Really? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, certainly. What I'm asking here is, where do you obtain the right to that value, as opposed to the people who did the work? Is it your position that just because something is valuable, it should be given to you? What if that changes the value available to the inventors? Should it still be given to you anyway?
I get that you want the valuable stuff. What I don't get is why you think you have a right to it.
Simply speaking, it's a viable economic model. It's provided a great deal of progress in a very short time -- surely you recognize that in the last hundred years or so, we have made more technical / knowledge progress than ever before in human history; if we cannot credit a capitalist attitude towards knowledge as the cause, we can at least say that the capitalist attitude towards knowledge hasn't prevented it from happening. It's really kind of hard for me to fault the system. And while I see others trying, I don't yet see anything convincing in the various contrary arguments.