AMD Releases Catalyst 9.6 For Linux

[mendieta]

I just don't like it when people portray going against Opensource philosophy as going against Linux (unless used in the GNU/Linux form). If you want to say binary-blobs go against Linux it is only because of the assumption of a constant ABI, which is a Windows thing.

I think very, very, very few people refer to the kernel when they say "Linux", but rather the whole operating system. The OS as a whole, I dare to say, is mostly developed by people who do care about freedom of choice, and therefore, the right to have access to the source code of what they use.

[MostAwesomeDude]

Ah yes, I wanted to comment on Linus' stance, but didn't recall what it was, and he does a good job of explaining it.

Linus doesn't give a damn about FOSS, actually he doesn't give a damn about anything except making his life easier.

I just don't like it when people portray going against Opensource philosophy as going against Linux (unless used in the GNU/Linux form). If you want to say binary-blobs go against Linux it is only because of the assumption of a constant ABI, which is a Windows thing.

Protip: nvidia and fglrx both consist partially of userspace blobs that act as DDX. nvidia also replaces the GLX module.

While Linus may be the pragmatic engineer, many X.Org members are of the opinion that it is impossible to maintain drivers that are out-of-tree (now out-of-fdo) and/or do not have source available. nvidia, fglrx, psb, and other drivers have demonstrated this problem amply through their inability to be usable over more than one or two revisions of the Xorg server despite only minor changes in the video DDX API.

[mendieta]

MostAwesomeDude: thanks for the insight. Question: is AMD/ATI sponsoring the open source drivers at all, besides opening the docs which is of course very nice? Do they have in-house people contributing code to the radeon and/or radeonHD repositories? Or are they at least in touch with you? If not, have they communicated whether they plan to do this in the future? (whenever the basic functionality is supported in the open source driver so they can just drop fglrx)?

If this is a FAQ documented somewhere I'll gladly read from there, please someone post the link

Thank you!

[Pfanne]

MostAwesomeDude: thanks for the insight. Question: is AMD/ATI sponsoring the open source drivers at all, besides opening the docs which is of course very nice? Do they have in-house people contributing code to the radeon and/or radeonHD repositories? Or are they at least in touch with you? If not, have they communicated whether they plan to do this in the future? (whenever the basic functionality is supported in the open source driver so they can just drop fglrx)?

If this is a FAQ documented somewhere I'll gladly read from there, please someone post the link

Thank you!

afaik they do have a few developers who work on the open source driver...
but you shouldnt forget the people who did the documentation for the cards, because that too seemed to be a shitload of work and is one of the most important parts for the development of this driver!

[mendieta]

Thanks!

but you shouldnt forget the people who did the documentation for the cards, because that too seemed to be a shitload of work and is one of the most important parts for the development of this driver!

I agree, I thought I actually mentioned that

[he_the_great]

I think very, very, very few people refer to the kernel when they say "Linux", but rather the whole operating system. The OS as a whole, I dare to say, is mostly developed by people who do care about freedom of choice, and therefore, the right to have access to the source code of what they use.

And most of those that do care about freedom of choice are the ones pushing that it is GNU/Linux not Linux. In any-case, drivers is one of the very few things where 'Linux' is used in reference to the kernel, whether intentional or not.

[energyman]

These drivers are great. you just need patches is all.
If you use a gentoo based distro, i've got an ebuild and fix
that will work to get them going. sorry, its a crappy ebuild
but it gets the job done.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=8EPKR4FM

cd and extract this to /usr/portage/x11-drivers/ati-drivers/
ebuild ati-drivers-8.62.ebuild digest
emerge =ati-drivers-8.62
(after you finish emerging the ebuild doesn't work well so you need to do this)
cd /usr/portage/distfiles
chmod +x ati-driver-installer-9-6-x86.x86_64.run
./ati-driver-installer-9-6-x86.x86_64.run

what? why do you post crap like this?
a) ebuild ... digest is wrong. FOR A LONG TIME
it is ebuild ... manifest

b) what the bullshit about running the installer? NEVER RUN THE INSTALLER ON A GENTOO SYSTEM!

Where did you come up with this?

[energyman]

I hope nobody fucked up his system with Darksurf's instructions.

Here:
http://rapidshare.com/files/245611112/ati-drivers.tbz
download that
extract in /usr/local/portage/x11-drivers/
make sure you have ~arch set for ati-drivers
emerge ati-drivers
eselect opengl set ati.

AND DON'T FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS FROM Darksurf!

[nanonyme]

Do they have in-house people contributing code to the radeon and/or radeonHD repositories?

Yes, they do. Also afaik most of the people who have been dedicating a bigger part of their attention span on r6xx/r7xx 3D last Spring and so have been AMD/ATi paid developers (including the ones they pay Novell to provide). If it wasn't for them, we wouldn't probably have nearly as much of the r6xx/r7xx specific code done in Mesa. (community attention seems to have been focusing more on r1xx-r5xx) And yes, they keep in touch with the community developers, both directly and through bridgman. And yeah, writing a documentation books is no small feat either.

[mirv]

Cheers energyman.
I was going to make my own ebuild tonight, but you've saved me the trouble!