The State Of Open-Source Radeon Driver Features

[bridgman]

I'm saying the should eliminate fglrx completely and maintain zero trees.

Sure, but then we eliminate our workstation business as well and that means less R&D money for everything else.

This won't necessarily be the case forever but it is today.

[duby229]

Sure, but then we eliminate our workstation business as well and that means less R&D money for everything else.

Not if the OSS drivers were complete.

Just take the opportunity to ask around. You'll be doing yourself a favor if you do. I've had the opportunity to see market share numbers for linux recently and nvidia dominates linux workstation graphics. fglrx is a pile of steaming crap and everybody but amd knows it.

[necro-lover]

MESA OpenGL level has progressed.
AMD attitude has not
They are straight, completely driver-type agnostic, highly passive player unless you bribe($$$) them
Current bribe list:
- microsoft ($$$$$$$)
- hollywood ($$$$$)

Ask yourself, how can you build anything stable on unstable ground?

There is also very high probability that (should AMD hardware be released) Android driver will be
- DRMed
- closed source
- financed as seperate entity, cannibalizing on Linux stack

:begin subliminal message:
And BTW, your arguing has no use, because you will not be given answers, but excuses.
If you want your arguing to have response and attitude as if you are customer, buy Windows
They know how to make open Linux driver better, not you Linux user
:end subliminal message:

And you really think these Nazi-corporatism people will read your post and chance there mind?

Buy ARM-based products if you don't like to support Microsoft in driver development or support the x86_64 Intel cpu monopole.

Sure in 2014 you can buy AMD-ARM products but the GPU part will still be a part of the microsoft-corporatism MAFIA.

[bridgman]

Not if the OSS drivers were complete.

Just take the opportunity to ask around. You'll be doing yourself a favor if you do. I've had the opportunity to see market share numbers for linux recently and nvidia dominates linux workstation graphics. fglrx is a pile of steaming crap and everybody but amd knows it.

Depends on what you mean by "complete". There's a big difference between what the open source dev community would consider complete and what we need to win in the 3D workstation market (a whole lot of expensive performance optimization work). Sharing code across all OSes gives us access to maybe 50x the development budget for the shared components (eg 3D).

Remember that NVidia used to have essentially 100% of the market and we had zero -- recent reports suggest we're up to 19% which is a big improvement.

[crazycheese]

@necro-lover:

I am waiting for Loongson to enter the market....

CPUs themself are not the problem, the accelerated graphic is the problem.

The ARM CPUs right now are rather weak. But yeah I am looking into this.

REALLY, REALLY bad Android allowed blobs on low level, that with Google own stance on Software: "We deeply believe in the importance of the open source model"
They made a flaw accepting this, they should have contacted chinese overseas, if that would result in an option to land a opensource product in the end.

The PC was never "Personal Computer", but "Proprietary Crap" EU should open its eyes.

Depends on what you mean by "complete". There's a big difference between what the open source dev community would consider complete and what we need to win in the 3D workstation market (a whole lot of expensive performance optimization work). Sharing code across all OSes gives us access to maybe 50x the development budget for the shared components (eg 3D).

Remember that NVidia used to have essentially 100% of the market and we had zero -- recent reports suggest we're up to 19% which is a big improvement.

You want a large piece of cake, but you give a crap about its cook
You are sharing the code within own walls, instead of sharing the code within whole planet, because you want advantage by exclusiveness instead of innovation.
You are like Nintendo. Still same Mario after many many years

[bridgman]

Huh ?

Proprietary driver code gets shared within our own walls because some of the OSes which use that shared code require secrecy.

Where we can, we make open source driver code which gets shared with the whole planet. Probably gets shared with that guy in the ISS too, but I haven't asked

Mario has had the longest, most successful video game career in history. This tiny plumber with the 12-foot vertical leap has been getting Princess Peach out of scrapes for years, as well as taking on different roles in more than 200 appearances. This has helped him move roughly 262 million video game units.

http://www.investopedia.com/slide-sh...#axzz2IGIcAAkD

[crazycheese]

Huh ?

Proprietary driver code gets shared within our own walls because some of the OSes which use that shared code require secrecy.

Open source driver code gets shared with the whole planet. Probably gets shared with that guy in the ISS too, but I haven't asked

It does, otherwise NASA would have to reinvent rockets.

So you officially acknowledged unconditional monopoly and loyality to microsoft and rest of the cartel

By 2030 America citizens will probably be required to have proprietary brain chip implants in order to watch HD content.
Fine job you do, sir! "Syndicate wars" sends greetings

[Hamish Wilson]

As a question for bridgman, how much of the driver work is done by AMD and how much is done by independent contributors (*cough* marek *cough*)? You say the current arrangement is "we provide info, community writes the driver" but AMD does seem to do almost all of the work on hardware enablement and does seem to do some feature work already (especially with regards to areas like OpenCL). It seems to me that AMD is in fact writing much of the driver already, with independent contributors only contributing some (still much appreciated) layers on top of it.

[bridgman]

So you officially acknowledged unconditional monopoly and loyality to microsoft and rest of the cartel

Um... no. I think I said something different

[bridgman]

As a question for bridgman, how much of the driver work is done by AMD and how much is done by independent contributors (*cough* marek *cough*)? You say the current arrangement is "we provide info, community writes the driver" but AMD does seem to do almost all of the work on hardware enablement and does seem to do some feature work already (especially with regards to areas like OpenCL). It seems to me that AMD is in fact writing much of the driver already, with independent contributors only contributing some (still much appreciated) layers on top of it.

Well, the original illusion was that we would contribute a few developers and the community would contribute thousands, and so the drivers would get written very quickly. We contributed our few developers, and the community contribution was somewhat less than thousands of developers, so yeah it's probably fair to say that we are doing relatively more of the driver work than one would have expected from the original "demands" to AMD.

That said, we worked out the original plan with active developers and our decision to proceed was based on the much more realistic expectations we got from them, not from the optimistic thinking at the beginning. The problem is that a lot of people still expect the optimistic driver deliverables even if the optimistic community development didn't materialize, and they're expecting us to make up the difference.

Very roughly, I would say that maybe half of the development is done by AMD developers and half by the community, including RH developers as well as Marek and others. Something like that...