ATI dropping support for <R600 - wtf!?

[yotambien]

No...I think that's actually a fairly natural reaction to people behaving like thoughtless malcontent mouthpieces across multiple threads.

Indeed. I personally don't have any problem with people disagreeing as much as they want as long as their arguments are remotely based on something else than pure ignorance. But lately these guys have managed to convert Phoronix in the bastard child of the Ubuntu forums.

[Stormking]

The F.U.D. stops here. It stops now. Either get involved with the driver development, or get lost.

Who are you to give commands like this? Owner of this board? Leader of the world? I think you take yourself way to serious. I think the people who have been betrayed by ATI, constantly - and now one last, big time - have the right to express their anger. Are you such an ATI fanboy that criticism to their decisions is a personal offense for you?

So please lay out in detail, how dropping the support for R300 - R500 is not a step backward - maybe temporary, but still - for owners of this hardware. How shall I see this as a positive thing? Tell me, please!

[DoDoENT]

I think the people who have been betrayed by ATI, constantly - and now one last, big time - have the right to express their anger. Are you such an ATI fanboy that criticism to their decisions is a personal offense for you?

What do you think ATi betrayed anyone? They're still giving a support for their cards, although through open source driver.

So please lay out in detail, how dropping the support for R300 - R500 is not a step backward - maybe temporary, but still - for owners of this hardware. How shall I see this as a positive thing? Tell me, please!

Maybe it is a step backward for people who use bleeding edge distributions which ship with the newest XServer that is not supported for R300-R500 cards with fglrx. But those people are used to having a buggy software and don't complain, but try to fix the thing. OTOH, people that prefer more stable distributions can use fglrx 9-3 for a long period of time (think of Ubuntu LTS or Debian), and within that period, open source drivers will evolve into a quality software. So, this ATi's move might be a step backward for you only if you choose to step backward (by installing the newest distributions).

[DirtyHairy]

Watch out, angry ATI customers, forum trolls, linux ecosystem parasites, creatures of the night - Saib the Ripper is out there to tear your posts to shreds

Honestly, that's a bit too much fanatism, is it? As for constructive criticism, saib, please reread my posts carefully and then detail me in what ways the issues I have had with the closed source drivers are mere trolling, related to my setup (gentoo stable, no funky stuff) or incompetence (been using linux for nearly 7 years and consider myself an experienced user whoe DOES contribute back in the form of help in forums, bug reports and occasional patches). Also detail me in what way the opensource driver in its current states improves the status of my hardware over fglrx NOW, not in one year. And, while your're at it, please elaborate on in what way you are supporting the "linux ecosystem" and which ecological niche you are living in: bug reports? maintaining packages? developing code? writing patches? documentation?

[Stormking]

And, while your're at it, please elaborate on in what way you are supporting the "linux ecosystem" and which ecological niche you are living in: bug reports? maintaining packages? developing code? writing patches? documentation?

Eating critics. Alive.

[cutterjohn]

Just to be clear here; for Windows we are doing exactly the same as NVidia; shifting to a legacy branch and then updating the drivers on a slower schedule. For Linux, we have already decent open source drivers (an option not available to NVidia today) and most people switching to the open source drivers have ended up preferring them, so we're focusing on continuing to improve the open source drivers rather than maintaining a legacy branch of fglrx.

Ah, the way that I had originally read other reports was that ALL development for older GPUs was halted, including Windows. This is somewhat better.

Not too sure about the OSS drivers myself, as I coerced Ubuntu 8.10 64b to install on the GT725(4850 mobility radeon), and it was like a blast from the past:
text installer

X.org failed to start(some sort of EDID problem as it was using VESA driver or trying to)

manual network config (had to, as the catalyst package required dpkg-dev)

built catalyst package for ubuntu 8.10

Then there was X.org happiness sort of. (Google Earth flickers like mad whenever the windows are updated, opengl windows leave their content behind when moved until dropped, etc.)

[bridgman]

So please lay out in detail, how dropping the support for R300 - R500 is not a step backward - maybe temporary, but still - for owners of this hardware. How shall I see this as a positive thing? Tell me, please!

Just to be clear, we're changing support level for all OSes, not just Linux. There's no new OS support for Windows either, although in fairness the impact on Windows users is less because Windows tends to keep ABI compliance and also releases new OS upgrades at a much slower rate.

We're not trying to paint this as something positive for users of the GPUs whos support levels were reduced, but I also think you'll find it's much less negative than you think. One recurring message through your posts is that providing support via the open source drivers is somehow cheating because of community involvement, and that we should be forced to do all the work ourselves -- do I have that right ?

Obviously people with 6xx/7xx GPUs might be happy because the folks working on their parts will have more time, but I realize that doesn't do anything for you.

We could task resources to keeping fglrx running on newer X, kernel and distro versions rather than working on open source drivers but in all seriousness I don't think that would make more than a couple of people happy. I think most users of 3xx-5xx parts are looking for ongoing improvement in new features (EXA, DRI2, KMS for suspend/resume etc..), not just compatibility with new distros and occasional bug fixes. The open source drivers can deliver that, but a legacy fglrx branch can not unless we double the team size (again).

[DirtyHairy]

One recurring message through your posts is that providing support via the open source drivers is somehow cheating because of community involvement, and that we should be forced to do all the work ourselves -- do I have that right ?

I don't think the reasoning behind this is so strange or difficult: if you tell me that ATI/AMD is actively working on code being pushed into the opensource repositories to ensure that the hardware dropped from fglrx will be supported to the level fglrx promised (perhaps modulo some 3D performance which I believe you is unavoidable) independently of how much other parties not payed by ATI get involved, then I happily stand corrected and retract my criticism on that. However, if this is not the case, then, at least for me, the ugly aftertaste is the impression that ATI/AMD is offloading the responsibility of creating a proper driver to other parties, something which is not what I would call proper support even if it eventually leads to working hardware and happy users.

It's not a matter of doing all the work yourself, but of not relying on the assumption that others will eventually do it.

[Stormking]

Just to be clear, we're changing support level for all OSes, not just Linux. There's no new OS support for Windows either, although in fairness the impact on Windows users is less because Windows tends to keep ABI compliance and also releases new OS upgrades at a much slower rate.

And also, I assume, the Windows driver worked, for the last years. If it had been as buggy as the linux version, there would be no more ATI.

One recurring message through your posts is that providing support via the open source drivers is somehow cheating because of community involvement, and that we should be forced to do all the work ourselves -- do I have that right ?

No, you got that wrong. If there was an open source driver with support for the core features and decent OpenGL performance, *NOW* - I would not say a word.

For five years, I got promises. About how the driver will be better, soon. Month after month after month. Well, it wasn't. As I said before, something was always broken. I still don't understand how you could break XV-on-TV-Out and not fix it for 18 months. I just don't get how something like this is even possible. Right now, your driver is broken, again. Doesn't work at all. The fifth release in a row!!!

And now? More promises. About how great the open source driver will be some time in the future. I don't care about a year from now. I want to use my laptop, *NOW*. I haven't been able to do that (to the full extent) for the greater part of its lifetime. In a year or two (when I assume the OSS driver will be feature complete, optimized and stable) I will very likely not use this hardware, anymore.

In Short: I just want to be able to use my damn laptop at one point, before it's completely obsolete. And I don't care where the driver comes from, if it's provided by the hardware manufacturer (seems logical to me), by the open source community (not their responsibility but if it works I'm okay with that) or if it falls from the sky. I even would have paid extra money if in return I would have got a working, stable and fast driver. I come from AmigaOS, I once was used to pay for hardware drivers (CybergraphX, TurboPrint, ScanQuix etc.)

[duby229]

I don't think the reasoning behind this is so strange or difficult: if you tell me that ATI/AMD is actively working on code being pushed into the opensource repositories to ensure that the hardware dropped from fglrx will be supported to the level fglrx promised (perhaps modulo some 3D performance which I believe you is unavoidable) independently of how much other parties not payed by ATI get involved, then I happily stand corrected and retract my criticism on that. However, if this is not the case, then, at least for me, the ugly aftertaste is the impression that ATI/AMD is offloading the responsibility of creating a proper driver to other parties, something which is not what I would call proper support even if it eventually leads to working hardware and happy users.

It's not a matter of doing all the work yourself, but of not relying on the assumption that others will eventually do it.

I think you need to read up on what open source actually means. Get on google and ask it a few basic questions like how does the development process work? How do the number of user correlate to the number of developers? What does "Free" actually mean? etc etc etc

ATi's reasoning doesnt really matter. The facts are that the open source drivers user base is about to increase substantially. This increase of users will inevitably lead to an increase of developers. The only question remains is how do the project leads organize the manpower. That is really the only issue that ATi needs to concern itself with. That is the reality behind open source development. Projects with a large user base also have large developer base. ATi's only concern should be how best to increase the size of the user base, and how to organize the manpower in the developer base.

This is the fundamental logic behind open source that makes it work so well. You need to learn some fundamentals.