Ubuntu 9.10 Gets Unreleased Catalyst 9.10 Driver

[anbog]

Hi bridgman,

Thanks for your continued effort to post updates, clarifications, and (not least) answer back to the sometimes rough comments in these forums.

Though I'm currently "stuck" with the open source drivers for my X1600 Pro (until next month - finally building a new computer!), I really curious about the video acceleration potential in the official drivers. Can you give out any information on AMD's strategy for its implementation (even if only in "marketing-speak")? It would be nice to know if it's awaiting further testing or maybe legal issues holding it back..?

[greg]

Seriously, bridgman, why do you still reply to the continuous trolling and moaning? Just ignore it.

[[Knuckles]]

Not sure I agree with that.

We could have spent relatively more time on upstream compatibility (shortening the delay between new kernel versions and support) and relatively less on game compatibility and other consumer issues. I think what happened was a reasonable division of effort.

Now that we have picked off a lot of the consumer issues it should be easier to choose where to allocate time, but I think the last six months was too soon to shift effort away from consumer fixes and spend it on faster upstream support.

Thanks for your answer. I hope that in the future this can be improved, but as you have said, it's not very useful if you do "support" the latest kernel and xorg, but in the end games and video don't work.

I stand corrected

But maybe it would be better if beta drivers could be made available to the public, allowing the distributions themselves to decide if they want to include them or not, instead of only giving priority to ubuntu releases that need a matching driver (openSUSE, mandriva, etc also need those drivers normally).

[m4rgin4l]

Seriously, bridgman, why do you still reply to the continuous trolling and moaning? Just ignore it.

That'll be a pretty stupid thing to do. You can't just ignore complains. This isn't the place to rant about how the latest Star Trek movie sucked, most of the complains come from people who bought an AMD card and want to get the most out of it. Ignoring consumer complains is BAD. Even if you're not willing or able to do a damn thing about them, you have to give the impression that complains are heard.

I think what bridgman is doing is right. I disagree with the company's strategy regarding the proprietary drivers and their relationship with the upstream packages, but bridgman is almost always polite and makes the effort to reach out to the disgruntled consumers.

[mirv]

bridgman is responsible for open source community interaction only. That he's on friendly terms with other people and does answer a lot of proprietary stuff is a huge bonus.
Complaints without any proof (i.e steps to reproduce, etc) are ignored by the majority of companies.

[nanonyme]

But maybe it would be better if beta drivers could be made available to the public, allowing the distributions themselves to decide if they want to include them or not, instead of only giving priority to ubuntu releases that need a matching driver (openSUSE, mandriva, etc also need those drivers normally).

Using it in other releases than the one it was given to isn't really that big of a hassle... I'd rather the distros that don't have it probably don't care enough.

[mtippett]

The fact that a desktop distro has to use unreleased beta drivers to get a reasonable consumer experience is sad...

Incorrect, the 8.66 driver is a formal release to Canonical. The Catalyst release that most people use is another formal release.

The model that AMD uses for engaging with supported distributions is two phase. Both phases are completed in conjunction with AMD and the distribution vendor.

Prior to the release of the distribution we will provide a driver that supports most of the features of the distribution. Then after the release of the distribution, we again work towards a followup release which knocks off high priority (from the distribution vendor - not necessarily the end users) bugs.

So for Jaunty, it was 8.60 and 8.632, for Karmic it is 8.66 and possibly 8.69(ish). The distribution packagers may pick up intermediate versions at their discretions, but the two distinguished versions are the ones that are effectively co-developed.

Regards,

Matthew

[nanonyme]

Incorrect, the 8.66 driver is a formal release to Canonical.

Thank you for confirming this. There's been all too much speculation about the origin of the fglrx releases in Ubuntu.

[conholster]

Not sure I agree with that.
... except PC GPU sales (so far). All indications are still that Linux is between 1 and 2% of our market, and closer to 1 than 2.

When we decided that we'd start building our windows boxes at work ATI/AMD only, it was because I thought you guy were really trying hard to improve the linux support. The nvidia integrated motherboards are cheaper. Yea we sell linux too.

[Schugy]

There's no support for my RS690M. Stupid assholes.