AMD Puts Out An OpenGL 4.2 Linux Driver

[energyman]

and you install the latest xorg-server the moment it is released, right?

Or upgrade when the next distro release comes out?

which is more common?

and which makes more sense to target since it gives you some time and room to plan and test?

[DaemonFC]

Interestingly, this is the exact same argument Microsoft used to explain why it was a good thing that IE6 rendered horribly broken websites.

And to a degree, it is correct - if there is a minor error on the page/shader, why not have the smarts to automatically recognize and correct it.

The downside is that it's then impossible to implement the same hacks across competing software, and websites/shaders get worse and worse until they are completely locked in to a single solution. Just take a look at WINE, and how much effort it is taking them to try and support anything other than NVidia drivers. It's not because the other drivers are buggy, it's because WINE started making a lot of assumptions about how the drivers would work over the years that were never valid but just happened to work on one set of drivers.

With the differences being that Microsoft created those incompatibilities on purpose to make people rely on WIndows and IE, and put out WYSIWYG editors that produced pages that only worked in IE.

I'm only saying that a graphics driver should recognize common problems and correct for them. Linux has so many hacks for hardware problems that I've lost count, would anyone say Linux should be purist and not run because your BIOS is crap or because you have an Intel HDA sound chipset that has some bugs?

[DaemonFC]

Priceless comments on Phoronix
Plus they are far from half-baked for everyone. *waves*

AMD is Homer Simpson now?

"Oooh! but I was using my whole ass."

[elanthis]

And to a degree, it is correct - if there is a minor error on the page/shader, why not have the smarts to automatically recognize and correct it.

That isn't why such things happen.

Such things happen because there are no test suites developed with the specs. So code has genuine bugs that accept invalid input, but nobody notices because there was no test that said "when you parse this here example invalid input, you should be generating this particular error on this line."

When said test suites exist, compatibility goes way way up for everyone involved, as all implementations both accept everything they should and reject everything they should.

[Kano]

@pingufunkybeat

Maybe you should not use wheezy/sid if you don't know how to handle multiarch. In that way Kanotix (or pure squeeze) would be simpler to use...

[smitty3268]

That isn't why such things happen.

Such things happen because there are no test suites developed with the specs. So code has genuine bugs that accept invalid input, but nobody notices because there was no test that said "when you parse this here example invalid input, you should be generating this particular error on this line."

When said test suites exist, compatibility goes way way up for everyone involved, as all implementations both accept everything they should and reject everything they should.

It was certainly part of what happened with IE, although a good test suite probably would have made it tougher for MS to do a lot of the things they did. For example, they specifically made sure it would render pages correctly if the developer opened a tag but then forgot to close it.

I won't pretend to know whether that holds true of OpenGL or not, but it probably has more to do with lack of a test suite there.

[xpander]

Nice driver. Mouse Stuck issue seems to be fixed with that. However i have watermark on the lower right screen now. which is ofc expected from beta driver. So Far no Problems experienced with the driver

[madbiologist]

Mesa is pretty darned strict and the open source drivers using it can handle GNOME Shell, KWin 4.7, Firefox with OpenGL compositing, and Chrome with OpenGL compositing. I'm sure there's not some vast conspiracy to simply break AMD's "perfect" (hah) proprietary driver. The amount of stuff that just doesn't work at all with FGLRX loaded is pretty compelling.

For whatever reason (Should I care? I'm just the victi....errrrr....customer of an AMD card that won't run the applications I want it to with their driver.) It gets a little old loading FGLRX when I want to play some intense game and radeon when I just want my desktop to work right. Someone needs to get their act together.

Similar to what energyman said above, be patient. All the problems with the above software and fglrx will be solved in time. KDE 4.7 was released less than a month ago and is not yet supported by fglrx. This support will probably come in October with Kubuntu 11.10. Firefox does not enable WebGL for fglrx until Firefox 6, which is due for release in two days time. fglrx will probably not support Firefox 6 until October (Ubuntu 11.10 or Fedora 16).

If you want to run unsupported software, go ahead, but don't complain so loudly. Perhaps you could help with bugfixing instead. And be patient.

[RealNC]

Similar to what energyman said above, be patient. All the problems with the above software and fglrx will be solved in time. KDE 4.7 was released less than a month ago and is not yet supported by fglrx. This support will probably come in October with Kubuntu 11.10. Firefox does not enable WebGL for fglrx until Firefox 6, which is due for release in two days time. fglrx will probably not support Firefox 6 until October (Ubuntu 11.10 or Fedora 16).

If you want to run unsupported software, go ahead, but don't complain so loudly. Perhaps you could help with bugfixing instead. And be patient.

"Unsupported"? The whole point of standards like OpenGL is that there doesn't need to be specific "support" for applications. The support is for OpenGL and its specs, not for KDE or Gnome.

If a driver needs to "support" the newest KDE, then that driver sucks by definition.

[mirv]

"Unsupported"? The whole point of standards like OpenGL is that there doesn't need to be specific "support" for applications. The support is for OpenGL and its specs, not for KDE or Gnome.

If a driver needs to "support" the newest KDE, then that driver sucks by definition.

OpenGL does not cover XRandR, or any of the X window extensions. Not everything with a driver supporting a compositing desktop is OpenGL.