The State Of Open-Source Radeon Driver Features

[crazycheese]

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...

You want people to start improving and hacking your stack, while you yourself give crap about opensource, that would be a miracle to materialize.
If you want people to work on your drivers, you need to perform serious motivation management, no less weaker than your average windows marketing Something like that

To counter "but will it blend?" question - answer "seed plenty to reap plenty", even good soil won't change this fact. But you do need to "pour less water"

[duby229]

I don't think anybody ever expected thousands of developers. We all knew that gpu development was going to be difficult. If there were thousands of developers they would have already been on the scene prior to AMD's involvement. That didnt happen because there arent that many people who have the knowledge and skill set to develop graphics drivers.

It's time to face the facts that gpu driver development is difficult and complex work that very few people can do. And those folks that do have the ability deserve to get paid for their work.

I don't know who "demanded" anything... It was more like "need"

[duby229]

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.

And it doesnt matter. It has 50x the budget and yet it is a barely functional unstable buggy pile of crap. In the vast majority of use cases it simply doesnt work. Sure its faster, but what does that matter if it doesnt render properly or crashes the x server or panics the kernel.

We don't need per app performance optimizations... We need stable functionality. I use the oss drivers on our workstations because it works well. But I can't get fglrx to be stable. I've tried everything and I just can't get it to be reliable. I've been patient enough. I've been waiting for years for fglrx to mature or for the oss drivers to finish basic functionality. Right now I'm more or less happy with the oss drivers, but the proprietary drivers are still just as much crap as they have always been.

[glisse]

Just for clarification hyperz is enabled by default in mesa master provided you have a proper kernel.

[dungeon]

Just for clarification hyperz is enabled by default in mesa master provided you have a proper kernel.

Is hyperz that stable to be enabled by default today ? I remember i was always have issues with it, especially with lighting - *lights thourough the wall* issue on r200.

[BO$$]

@bridgman

Hello there! I did a small survey among friends asking them what would they choose: a driver that is open source but slower and doesn't implement all features or a proprietary driver that works just like in windows in terms of speed and functionality? They all answered proprietary.

From what I've read, your duty as an employee of AMD is to provide the most value to the company, that is contribute most to their bottom line. And how do you do that? By listening to your customers and serving their needs to your best ability. Your customers want the proprietary drivers. They don't care about this open source bullshit. They just want something that is equally fast to their windows driver. The radeon driver isn't it. So, instead of wasting your time and your company's money, I think that since people want the proprietary driver you should focus on that one. You actually should focus on those guys at X.org and tell them to stop changing the ABI every damn month so you don't have to change things in the proprietary driver just so it can work on the new version. I think that your company and your customers would be best served if you and other people at AMD manage to convince those guys from X.org to actually write a good API once and for all and drop support for the radeon driver.

Just my 2 cents. Have a good day!

[necro-lover]

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

You just talk in this language to us: "Newspeak" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

You don't need to confirm, in whatsoever language you like to speak, what we already know because of the facts and history.

the opensource movement of AMD is a PR-alibi event.

yes a nice, very nice PR-alibi-event but its still a PR-alibi-event.

its like a borg talking to us: we are borg we are not so bad for you as you may think.

[BO$$]

You just talk in this language to us: "Newspeak" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

You don't need to confirm, in whatsoever language you like to speak, what we already know because of the facts and history.

the opensource movement of AMD is a PR-alibi event.

yes a nice, very nice PR-alibi-event but its still a PR-alibi-event.

its like a borg talking to us: we are borg we are not so bad for you as you may think.

Exactly the reason AMD shouldn't contribute to open source. Because of these idiots. Take the hint bridgman and only work on proprietary. And better yet, don't provide a driver for linux at all. Let them feel the squeeze.

[DanL]

Qaridarium/necro-lover posting a 4chan-style image is a sure sign that this thread is about to degenerate into lots of noise and little signal. At least it was nice to have a status update and intelligent conversation with AMD driver devs (thanks, folks).

[bridgman]

Exactly the reason AMD shouldn't contribute to open source. Because of these idiots. Take the hint bridgman and only work on proprietary. And better yet, don't provide a driver for linux at all. Let them feel the squeeze.

Yeah, we've been thinking of switching to BSD.

(runs and hides)