"Ask ATI" dev thread

[Malikith]

Yeah, I got a question for ATI, what do they smoke? What do they do 8 hours a day 5 days a week and release a 3 bug fix release on the most simple things that could possibly be added to a release. I like AMD, I really do, but with all the outstanding issues and bugs in fglrx, they could only manage to fix 3 extremely minor issues over the course of a month?

I don't care if you have 1 or 3 guys working on that driver, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, you can accomplish alot more than that. I almost think they are playing ping pong in the office. Going around with beer bongs and getting completely wasted then they sit down and well.. Okay! Time to get to work! Lets see... Oh yeah, we need to add 2.6.23 kernel support, okay, that should take us about a month to add that.

Now, you can say, well they are preparing for the now called 7.12 driver, I think thats bogus. So they're going to have everyone wait yet another month and don't even fix at least one major issue? We aren't concerned with new features at this point, we really could care less, we want bug fixes, and stable drivers. Something we honestly never had. Yeah now they can run pretty fast when they want to, but that doesn't solve the issue.

Alright I'm done venting. I still have faith in AMD, and we better see some decent results in the releases to come since they are hiring more people for their Linux driver development. Because if we see another release like this, I'm going to hold my end of the bargain and give Phoronix a video called "What happens when you have a ATI card and a baseball bat?". You want action, I'll dish it out in full. Haha.

Alright well anyway, I hope to see better releases from them in the future, this release was a joke. I think at this pace, the Open Source driver will pass fglrx in about a year to year in a half from now.

[ivanovic]

@Malikith:
Did it ever come to your mind that there might be fixes, that are not listed in the changelog? I do know that *many* devs are rather sloppy when it comes to writing down the real changes for mundane stuff like a "changelog".

The problem is that users do not have a way to check if their problems are fixed when the changelog is this incomplete. I think one of the main problems AMD/ATI had so far was communication with the community. But I think the posts from Bridgman indicate some change in that area. The real things I would love to know are simple:

- Will there be an official bugtracker that gets frequented by the devs so that users do have a way to see if their problems are fixed?
- Will there eventually a more complete listing of the fixed/known problems? Currently the list is really abysmal.

[yoshi314]

Did it ever come to your mind that there might be fixes, that are not listed in the changelog? I do know that *many* devs are rather sloppy when it comes to writing down the real changes for mundane stuff like a "changelog".

i'd rather see super-detailed changelog even if it would contain boring stuff. they must have some SCM for their code - see how easy it is to make a detailed linux kernel changelog without too much work.

the only explanation for me is - they still have tons of problems with the new codebase, and trying to get it to compile (oh, and work ) takes lots of time.

[macmus]

the only explanation for me is - they still have tons of problems with the new codebase, and trying to get it to compile (oh, and work ) takes lots of time.

i think they are reverse-engeenering the nvidia driver trying to tailor it for ati card, cause i seriously doubt they realy can come up with they own bugfixes ..

[fettouhi]

I would like to know why the new driver (8.43.3 & 8.42.3) makes the screen go black for 2-3 secs when you start a video file (with or without compiz)? Is the driver switching screens when I runs a video?

Regards

André

[kirù]

I would like to know if you really are devs

[mal13]

When do we start to get official support for Ati linux users?

Why don't you make install packages available as .DEB AND .RPM's??

[gorgorbay]

I heartily agree with Malikith's post.

Here are my questions:

* Why is there no real customer support for fglrx? (bug tracker, official forum and so on) and why does ATI people answer to me when I point one of their driver's shortcomings, "ask the linux community".

* Are ATI linux users one day going to be considered with respect? a decent driver would be the first step towards that.

* Why should I keep my current Radeon HD 2600 and not buy a nVidia card instead? Indeed, your drivers don't provide full support to linux applications (some as old as tvtime) and you are absolutely silent as per when proper support will be available (there I re-join Malikith and his urge for baseballing his GC)

[platform]

* Why is there no real customer support for fglrx? (bug tracker, official forum and so on) and why does ATI people answer to me when I point one of their driver's shortcomings, "ask the linux community".

This is not really specific to ATI but a lot of other companies do this too. This is just a nicer way of saying "we don't really care about your problems because you are not using Windows, so sort them out yourself". This becomes really annoying when the problem is in a binary driver or in the device itself.

[metala]

i'd rather see super-detailed changelog even if it would contain boring stuff. they must have some SCM for their code - see how easy it is to make a detailed linux kernel changelog without too much work.

the only explanation for me is - they still have tons of problems with the new codebase, and trying to get it to compile (oh, and work ) takes lots of time.

I'm PHP devel, and i wouldn't make even changelog, there is a general TODO list, and finished list, and some colors (dokuwiki). No bug tracker, nothing like that, cause it needs time the idea to hit you into the face, and if you comment everything, you will loose the trail. I would rather write about general things done, and this thing that were difficult to resolve.
Said short : Writing every change, makes you loose focus on the project. Wasting of time.