Bettering Radeon Gallium3D Performance With PCI-E 2.0

[darkbasic]

AMD has a shared codebase and a proprietary driver with lots of developers, while intel has only the open source one.
I would be glad if AMD will drop catalyst for linux and shift 50 developers to mesa, unfortunately the vast majority of the users do not care about the "free speech" if there is the "free beer".

[oliver]

unfortunately the vast majority of the users do not care about the "free speech" if there is the "free beer".

They don't care about Free speech at all. They rather even pay for the beer. Not because they don't think it's better, they just care about other things more.


It's the same with everything. We all know, that 'green' is better for everyone, the planet, personal health etc. Yet we don't care enough (this has changed a little in recent years).

Very very sad, but very very true.

[bug77]

I would be glad if AMD will drop catalyst for linux and shift 50 developers to mesa...

And they probably would if it made sense. But since Linux' graphics stack is a moving target, what would that accomplish? Plus, they'd still have to maintain Catalyst for Windows anyway.
For all the good things OSS does, there's an equal amount of ego that makes sure developers will never agree on a standard solution. And this is the reason OSS can't penetrate certain markets.

[sk8erboi101]

How do I put this command when booting the kernel?

[Qaridarium]

But I imagine looking at e.g. the power saving code could still tell a very good programmer why radeon on the "low" profile still uses more power than fglrx.

I mean, why doesn't AMD simply have somebody going over the code of catalyst, deleting everything patented or "secret" and release the nonfunctional rest? Could still be helpful for low level stuff like power saving and communicating properly with the hardware...

the answer is simple: rewriting the code complete new is cheaper and cleaner and more save in law and do have higher security standart.

[Eduard Munteanu]

And they probably would if it made sense. But since Linux' graphics stack is a moving target, what would that accomplish? Plus, they'd still have to maintain Catalyst for Windows anyway.

I'm not sure if it's legally-possible, but a shared FOSS driver stack on Windows might help AMD too. The Linux graphics stack is a moving target but, AFAIK, Gallium should do fairly well in terms of OS abstraction. They'd just need to make releases, i.e. pick, compile and bundle the various bits and pieces like distros do, while offloading some of the coding burden to the community (including the Linux people for the common parts).

The problem is the FOSS stack is behind Catalyst in terms of features and performance and I'm not sure anybody has done that work for Windows, which is quite a disincentive at the moment.

[Qaridarium]

AMD has a shared codebase and a proprietary driver with lots of developers, while intel has only the open source one.
I would be glad if AMD will drop catalyst for linux and shift 50 developers to mesa, unfortunately the vast majority of the users do not care about the "free speech" if there is the "free beer".

The announcement for this comes probably tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.

I got a tip about this tropic today.

[agd5f]

This has been addressed before, but the closed source driver has a completely different coding style and kernel/userspace interfaces. Most of the code would have to be completely rewritten before it had even a remote chance of making it upstream. There are plenty of OS-agnostic drivers out there (realtek, etc.) who release common shaded code for all OSes and it never gets merged upstream because the coding styles don't match or the driver uses it's own infrastructure for certain things rather than some common infrastructure provided by the kernel. It's not really feasible to redesign the entire closed source driver (much of which is planned years in advance as new chips and initiatives are planned) just so it could be shared more easily with open source. The market for open source drivers just isn't big enough.

And before you reply, yes, I know, chicken and egg.

[Qaridarium]

The market for open source drivers just isn't big enough.
And before you reply, yes, I know, chicken and egg.

sure you are a nice dev but economic isn't your strength.

In economic you deal with the future not with the past or with the presence.

this means the grow factor is more important than the market-share.

right now linux do have 3,5%(2%andorid) market share (source: wikipedia.org) and a grow rate of 40% every 6 month (source: Net Applications ).
and market analyst found out that nearly 80% of all companys wana grow there opensource usage to lower costs. (source: linux foundation market survey)

just do the mathematics: calculate grow rate 40% every 6 month on the market share 1,5%

this numbers prove : Microsoft is allready death

[darkbasic]

And they probably would if it made sense.

They don't and they will never because:

1) Peoples do not care.
2) Catalyst is made of share code for the 90% of it and the linux team is very little (20? 30? maybe even 50 peoples?) because of that, those developers alone wouldn't be able to develop a competitive stack because the shared part is made by thousands of developers.

Peoples will care about free software only if someone will find a way to stop piracy, when they will have to pay 600$ for a microsoft office suite plus another 600$ for a retail copy of windows just because someone sent them a fucked .doc (or whatever they call it in office 20${XY}) something will change.