On Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:12:58 -0800, Kelly Clowers wrote: > On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 13:48, Camaleón wrote:
>>> So what, you want AMD to hire a bunch of devs to write a complete open >>> source driver? They can't afford to do that. >> >> They couldn't do that... although they wanted. >> >> AMD has not released the full 3D specifications for their drivers, only >> *partial documentation* for some of their chipsets, so even with 100 >> dedicated engineers working on ATI drivers, we still have an incomplete >> open source driver. > > What? Where did you get that? 100 dedicated devs would be absurd for any > driver, and their sure aren't that many in the case of ATI. That "100 people" was just a "supposition", sir :-) > There are a > few (like 3 or 4 I think) people employed to do work on ATI drivers, I > don't know that those are their only duties. And then there are a > handful of people that do some work in their free time. > > Arguably even more than docs, a shortage of developer-hours is a major > problem for all Xorg related work. Just 3 or 4 people should be enough if they could get access to the full specs for the hardware. But that is not the case. >> >From AMD website [1]: >> >> *** >> Is complete driver source code available? (...) > That is simple referring to their closed source drivers. Which are the only ones having full 3D support and capabilities. > The only thing > I know of that has actually been held back is some of the MPEG > acceleration stuff, since ATI implements it by licensing patents from > MPEG-LA . AFAIK, anything else that has not been released is due to the > docs not actually existing in a coherent form, or they are still being > cleared by the legal department. And do you find that a "linux-friendly" approach? The status of the supported capabilities by "radeon" and "radeonhd" drivers is as follows: http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/RadeonFeature http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/radeonhd%3Afeature Does not look so good. >> I am not seeing here nothing but the same "arguments" provided by >> nvidia and other supposed "linux-friendly" hardware vendors out there. > > I don't know that anyone has called Nvidia "Linux friendly". No, but at least nvidia clearly says what is their thinking about this. >>> What they have done is fantastic and really about the very best that >>> can reasonably be expected. >> >> Well, yes. >> >> But AMD could do more for its Linux users and in fact, does not :-( > > Yes and no? What is this, a quantum superposition? I agree that Xorg people have done a very good job (by their own) with radeon/radeonhd drivers. But I have to disagree in regards AMD/ATI. It's not a linux-friendly company and has not released the full specs for their vga cards. Just some papers. In these days, that's not enough. Greetings, -- Camaleón -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
