AMD's R300 Gallium3D Driver Is Looking Good For 2011

[Dard]

The point of open source is that the community helps. When the community just expects ATI to do all the work, it's not open source at all. You might as well use the proprietary drivers on a proprietary OS, because there you've got a huge team of people doing everything for you.

I can understand you, up to a point.
There is still a big difference.
With documentation here and source code open, I pretty much have guarantee that the hardware I have now will still work in years to come. Even if the driver would be abandoned by AMD and not be further developed, chances would be very high that it would at least be adapted to new kernel versions and similar changes.

Example: I'm a victim of the Intel GMA500 mess. There doesn't seem to be a chance I will ever be to run my laptop on a newer kernel or any future Ubuntu. I will probably never be able to use it like it is supposed to because the occasionaly wake-up crashes will never be fixed. I am sure these problems would already be fixed if the sources would be open source, regardless how abandoned the code is by the original programmers.

Still, I understand you.
I am really really sad that the community does very little except testing. Open specification was supposed to help the community, it was lobbied for by the open source people for so long, and now it seems that the open specification did not help much. Would the open source radeon drivers have been programmed based on closed documentation, how much behind its current status would it be? Not too much I feel.
I am especially sad because this gives other manufacturers good reasons to keep their specifications closed, because opening them clearly doesn't necessarily result in any advantage.

Note: This is not a complaint to anybody.
I read a little in the specifications, and there's no way I would ever start working on the driver unless I get one or two years of education in hardware/software co-design and a full time job. It's just too complex to work on one or two hours after work.
I don't complain at Ubuntu or Redhat that they don't invest in the AMD driver, because their job is to make the software easy to install and the hardware to work. They have the closed source drivers, and until AMD starts to abandon current hardware in their closed source driver I don't see a need of Ubuntu to invest tons of money in drivers of one of the graphics card manufacturers.
Really, I can't see any company but AMD who has enough motivation to spend a lot of money (just some money wouldn't be enough) for these drivers.

This leaves me grateful for AMD that pay as much as they do and be thankful for the work their open source developers do and be frustrated as hell that the biggest strength of open specifications and open source failed in the development of modern graphics drivers.

[Mr James]

Wonderful. By the time my HD5750 is almost fully supported, it will be obsolete and I'll be waiting for the FOSS drivers to support my new card again. Cool.
Not to sound like an ungrateful bastard though, thanks FOSS dev team.

[yotambien]

I don't complain at Ubuntu or Redhat that they don't invest in the AMD driver, because their job is to make the software easy to install and the hardware to work. They have the closed source drivers, and until AMD starts to abandon current hardware in their closed source driver I don't see a need of Ubuntu to invest tons of money in drivers of one of the graphics card manufacturers.

You shouldn't complain about Redhat, because they do invest in driver development as well as Xorg (and a ton of other things). You can get an idea of the breadth of this investment from this page. Ubuntu? Yes, that's a completely different story (but I think they wrote some Gnome notification thing...or something : ).

[Panix]

One main complaint is it seems you have to create an xorg.conf file which was supposedly redundant or not required anymore. But, for OSS radeon cards, at least older ones, you need to.

Here's a Gentoo user having trouble with his older card and he created the xorg.conf file:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-857308.html

At least, he's having better luck with his card. I'm using Debian but it's not the first time I've had trouble with my card (Radeon 9000). Even after googling, for recent info and articles/posts, I still don't know what the solution is. I'm not sure what should be in xorg.conf if anything and there's no indication of what is required for the support to be enabled. So, no one cares about having this optimized so unless you're a computer hacker, you might as run Windows with this older hardware.

[Dard]

Ubuntu? Yes, that's a completely different story (but I think they wrote some Gnome notification thing...or something : ).

I see plenty of things where Ubuntu really should invest money in if they can.
I just meant that I don't see the free AMD graphics drivers as a priority for companies like Ubuntu or Redhat.
Now, network drivers, virtualization, working environments and so on, yes, this is what I would Ubuntu expect to invest more in.

Which is why I don't complain about distributors. I just complain about a regrettably bad situation, which is, alas, an understandable situation.

[yotambien]

I see plenty of things where Ubuntu really should invest money in if they can.
I just meant that I don't see the free AMD graphics drivers as a priority for companies like Ubuntu or Redhat.
Now, network drivers, virtualization, working environments and so on, yes, this is what I would Ubuntu expect to invest more in.

Which is why I don't complain about distributors. I just complain about a regrettably bad situation, which is, alas, an understandable situation.

Right, I myself only wanted to point out that mentioning Ubuntu and Redhat in the same sentence when talking about upstream development (including graphics drivers) is, at the very least, totally unfair towards Redhat.

[Mr James]

I see plenty of things where Ubuntu really should invest money in if they can.
I just meant that I don't see the free AMD graphics drivers as a priority for companies like Ubuntu or Redhat.
Now, network drivers, virtualization, working environments and so on, yes, this is what I would Ubuntu expect to invest more in.

Which is why I don't complain about distributors. I just complain about a regrettably bad situation, which is, alas, an understandable situation.

I wonder what Ubuntu employees spend thier time working on. Oh that's right, they did come up with a font and a Unity interface nobody (as far as I read) seems to like.

[devius]

I wonder what Ubuntu employees spend thier time working on. Oh that's right, they did come up with a font and a Unity interface nobody (as far as I read) seems to like.

And the software center/store or whatever it's called nowadays. Oh, and you can read pretty far

[Mr James]

And the software center/store or whatever it's called nowadays. Oh, and you can read pretty far

New guys (to Linux) seem to like it at ubuntuforums.org

That's about it. In every other forum including but not limited too the Debian forums, Gentoo forums, Arch forums, Phoronix and so on do not like the unity thing, at least on a desktop.

At least it is easy to change.

[pingufunkybeat]

ATI's support for R200/R250 and R300 still sucks horribly.

What good is this OSS if the user has to tweak everything and have to go through pages and pages via Google to get an ancient card working (which would work fine in Windows)?

OSS, yeah, sure...

Nice of ATI to thumb its nose in the direction of Linux but claim otherwise with a bunch of sheep nodding along the way!

Wait, you have an r300 card now?

Or are you just in a trolling mood again?