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Insight Into AMD's Linux Driver Development

Posted by CmdrTaco on Mon Jun 04, 2007 11:07 AM
from the they-should-all-wear-hats-while-they-code- dept.
AMD Software Linux
Cowards Anonymous writes "It's no secret that ATI Technologies has had a rough time in the past delivering display drivers that met the expectations of their customers. When ATI started out producing a FireGL and Radeon Linux driver they for some time were greatly behind NVIDIA's feature-rich driver. The early ATI Linux driver had lacked essential functionality such as PCI Express and x86_64 architecture support and was also affected by stability and performance problems — not to mention a great deal of bugs."
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  • rough start (Score:4, Informative)

    by phrostie (121428) on Monday June 04 2007, @11:13AM (#19383153)
    when i switched from NVidia to ATI, it was a rough start.
    for the longest time i couldn't get the driver to build/install, then one day everything just worked!
    i can't tell you which version it was, but from then on, i've had no problems or complaints.

    an open driver would be nice, but even still, my compliments to them.
    • So you had a rough time gettint the driver to even compile, let alone instal or even (gasp!) work. Then, one day, it just started working.

      So far, so good - this is a typical "ATI on Linux" story, but of the happy-ending sort (which are rather rare, from what I saw so far).

      What I do not understand is which way do they deserve your compliments for providing such sub-par software? I'd bring the card right back to the shop I bought it, demand my money back, and buy a nVidia! I haven't had a problem with n

    • Re:rough start (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Chandon Seldon (43083) on Monday June 04 2007, @02:24PM (#19385807) Homepage

      Everything works? So you can use Firefox at a reasonable speed when logged in as a second user now? You can use Beryl now? Those things sure don't work on the X1300 I bought (a horrible mistake) a couple months ago.

      It's really absurd - if they'd just release the programming info for their hardware the X.org drivers would support this stuff inside a week.

  • Not really surprising (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Endo13 (1000782) on Monday June 04 2007, @11:14AM (#19383159)
    It's also no secret that ATI has long had problems with their drivers for Windows too.

    No, this is not a troll. I use ATI cards almost exclusively myself and I prefer them over NVidia, but I do have to admit that Nvidia's drivers as a general rule seem much better designed and simpler to install.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Eukariote (881204)
      Sigh, yet another general statement without supporting evidence. I think your post is a sly bit of astroturfing for NVidia. ATI has had WHQL ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHQL_Testing [wikipedia.org] ) certified new driver releases for years now. NVidia has only recently been able to get their new releases WHQL qualified. Sure, there is more to drivers, but it indicates that ATI has had a solid development, testing, and qualification regimen in place for a long time.

      • Re:Not really surprising (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Scoth (879800) on Monday June 04 2007, @11:53AM (#19383669)
        Not sure what kind of "supporting evidence" you might want, but I once bought a Radeon once to replace my aging Voodoo3. I forget the exact model number, but at the time it was about $175 or $200. In some games it was *slower* than the Voodoo3. I gave up and reinstalled Windows clean, but still had the same trouble. Took it back, got a GeForce 3 Ti 200 for about the same price, and it worked beautifully out of the box. Fast forward to several years later and I was looking to replace that card, and I got another Radeon. Installed the drivers, slapped in the new card - poof, blue screen on boot in the video drivers. Stuck the GF3 back in, removed it from the DevMan, and manually installed the VGA driver. Rebooted with the ATI, installed the drivers - back to Bluescreen on Boot. So, another clean install of Windows, and still got bluescreens on boot. Took that Radeon back and got a GF 6600GT again for about the same price, slapped it in, and it's worked ever since. I have a hard time believing I had other bad hardware in there to cause the troubles since in both cases the GeForces worked perfectly. Not to mention the GeForces worked much more nicey in Linux than the Radeons ever did. I genuinely gave ATI two tries now, and both times I was hit with troublesome drivers. I doubt I'll be buying another Radeon anytime soon.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Endo13 (1000782)

        Sigh, yet another general statement without supporting evidence. I think your post is a sly bit of astroturfing for NVidia.

        No it's not. I can't really say much about the Nvidia drivers because I've never owned an Nvidia card personally. But when I have to install them for someone else, they always just seem to work.

        I've used ATI ever since I finally gave up my Voodoo2. I have just about every version of drivers ATI released since the first Catalyst came out, and quite a few from before. They all worked, for the most part, but the install process does not seem as streamlined as Nvidia's, and I still keep hearing from people who

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by nschubach (922175)
        WHQL does not guarantee ease of use, installation or compatibility. It just means that it tells Windows what it wants to hear instead of what it might need to hear.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by gstoddart (321705)

        Sigh, yet another general statement without supporting evidence. I think your post is a sly bit of astroturfing for NVidia. ATI has had WHQL ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHQL_Testing [wikipedia.org] ) certified new driver releases for years now.

        Hmmm .... "Windows Hardware Quality Laboratories testing" .... is this like buying a PC which says it's "Vista Ready" only to find out that means "well, not Vista with the new GUI stuff, just running with the old GUI"? It's got no credibililty with a lot of people. (eg. , specif [msdn.com]

      • Re:Not really surprising (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Cal Paterson (881180) * on Monday June 04 2007, @04:41PM (#19387737)

        Sigh, yet another general statement without supporting evidence. I think your post is a sly bit of astroturfing for NVidia. ATI has had WHQL certified new driver releases for years now. NVidia has only recently been able to get their new releases WHQL qualified. Sure, there is more to drivers, but it indicates that ATI has had a solid development, testing, and qualification regimen in place for a long time.
        This statement is utterly untrue. WHQL is pretty much just a case of;
        1. Co-operate with MS on driver releases (and institute their "minimum-standard" level of QA)
        2. Pay MS what I'm sure is a large some of money for the privilege
        Lack of WHQL doesn't indicate anything about driver quality apart from that certain companies are co-operating with MS to institute a minimum standard; many, many third parties develop drivers over and above this already. That fact that companies do not do WHQL says less about their hackers' development style than it does about their executives attitudes towards unjustifiable costs.

  • So ? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BESTouff (531293) on Monday June 04 2007, @11:14AM (#19383161) Homepage
    When ATI started out producing a FireGL and Radeon Linux driver they for some time were greatly behind NVIDIA's feature-rich driver.

    And they still are.

    • I second that. fglrx in Linux on x86_64 still sucks. And where the hell is Composite? Why is that not working yet? That should have been done a long time ago. They keep releasing new versions (such as 8.37) but they never fix the outstanding issues. Installation is still no fun if you happen to run a non-RPM based distro (you know... Ubuntu or Debian). It sucks that my laptop came with X1400 and I'm stuck with AMD/ATI...

  • The best way... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by twoboxen (1111241) on Monday June 04 2007, @11:16AM (#19383187)
    to build a customer base is to alienate your existing customer base. I bought an R200-based laptop a couple years ago. ATI decided to just not support those cards in their fglrx driver package one day. Why would I buy from a company who won't continue support for their own products for more than a couple years? I will make every effort to never support them again until they get customer/product support in order. NVIDIA, bravo.

    • Re:The best way... (Score:5, Informative)

      by the_humeister (922869) on Monday June 04 2007, @11:30AM (#19383373)
      If you're using some sort of Linux/*BSD/etc, you shouldn't have to worry because X.org has had mostly full and useable R100, R200, and recently R300 open source drivers for quite some time now. They're decent. I've been playing Unreal Tournament (and variants) without problems. The only issue is visuals with Doom 3 do to S3 Texture compression being patented. If you're using Windows, well good luck!

  • what a joke (Score:5, Insightful)

    by radarsat1 (786772) on Monday June 04 2007, @11:18AM (#19383213) Homepage

    While ATI/AMD is working steadfast in addressing all of these issues and further enhancing their level of Linux support, many of their customers do not realize all of the work that goes into these drivers.


    Whatever. They don't need to do any work. All they need to do is open up the specs, and people will do all the work for them. People aren't bitching that the drivers don't work, people are bitching because they aren't allowed to improve them.

    There's a whole community out there willing to do all the software work from scratch, but they don't have the resources to create the hardware. The hardware developers somehow see this need to provide the software themselves, instead of taking advantage of the community, but then go and do a shoddy job of it. That's why people are annoyed by the whole thing. It could be so much better, with very little effort from ATI, but they steadfastly refuse to play nice, forcing developers to resort to reverse engineering. Same goes to Nvidia by the way, but at least they seem to be a bit more competent in Linux/X.org driver development.

    This whole argument is just a big excuse. We don't want excuses, we want some damn drivers.

    --- someone who's been buying Nvidia since he realized that ATI doesn't work as well on Linux.

    • People aren't bitching that the drivers don't work, people are bitching because they aren't allowed to improve them.


      Well... I mean, I'm bitching that they don't work.

      This whole argument is just a big excuse. We don't want excuses, we want some damn drivers.


      Yes. Personally, I don't care who writes them, as long as they're functional and not encumbered by something redolent of evil.

    • Re:what a joke (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Kadin2048 (468275) * <slashdot@kadin.xoxy@net> on Monday June 04 2007, @11:27AM (#19383335) Homepage Journal
      The hardware developers somehow see this need to provide the software themselves, instead of taking advantage of the community, but then go and do a shoddy job of it.

      Bingo.

      When hardware companies try to make software, the result is almost inevitably shit. There are some exceptions, but big hardware companies tend to see software development as a 'cost center,' an afterthought to be minimized as much as possible, rather than a critical and major part of their product.

      Look at scanners if you want. I've used some great film scanners in the past; brilliant hardware engineering, but coupled with the absolutely shit software that came in the box with it, it was practically a doorstop. To get anything else done, you had to get VueScan or Silverfast -- addon software written by people for whom software is their primary focus.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by michrech (468134)
        When hardware companies try to make software, the result is almost inevitably shit. There are some exceptions, but big hardware companies tend to see software development as a 'cost center,' an afterthought to be minimized as much as possible, rather than a critical and major part of their product.

        There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, SO LONG AS THEY OPEN UP THE DAMNED SPECS SO THE COMMUNITY CAN WORK WITH IT PROPERLY. I can only assume I'm not the only one who thinks so, either.

        I'm sure "the communi

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Kadin2048 (468275) *

          Company 'N' produces chips. Some come out great when tested. Some have minor failures when tested. They use software to disable features of the hardware so that the broken bits don't fail since they're not being used. Then you have a premium card and a 'value' card that's cheaper. But sometimes stuff works and they disable it in software anyway so they can still sell 'value' cards and premium cards at different price points. If you were to look at the source, you'd see this and just re-enable those bits to

    • nVidia (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Z34107 (925136)

      All they need to do is open up the specs, and people will do all the work for them

      Yes... if ATI opens up their specs, their people will do all the work for nVidia's people. And vice versa.

      I, for one, can understand why there's some animosity towards releasing the blueprints of your state-of-the-art 5-hojillion-manhours-in-the-making video card to all the tubes on the internets.

      Granted, it's not the same as giving nVidia a briefcase of trade secrets, but you have to be careful when your company's e

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by revengebomber (1080189)
        The community COULD do their own drivers, but the specs aren't available. Everything about how to interface with the card would have to be found via reverse engineering.

        I'm fairly sure the reason the specs aren't open, is because it would disclose some "secrets" about how the companies optimize their cards.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by jimstapleton (999106)
          Or because they use the OpenGL and DirectX specs to develop their card interfaces, both of which cost money and NDAs to attain, and thus they can't release the specs without risk of violating some copyright or patent, setting the leagal war machines of two companies upon them.

        • Re:what a joke (Score:5, Insightful)

          by jZnat (793348) * on Monday June 04 2007, @01:25PM (#19384965) Homepage Journal
          It's also possible (and likely) that they are violating patents they don't have a license for, so giving the specs out might bring light to this. A stupid legal reason rather than a technical reason...

  • Nvidia is not the competition (Score:3, Insightful)

    by crush (19364) on Monday June 04 2007, @11:18AM (#19383217)

    The article is a long excuse explaining why AMD/ATI are unable to release decent GNU/Linux drivers. That's interesting enough as far as it goes: AMD/ATI and Nvidia both have crap closed, proprietary drivers which don't work well, make kernel updgrading difficult and are unauditable for security. So why bother with them? Further ATI have a history of dragging their ass [livejournal.com] and blocking the release of Free drivers,

    Why bother with this crap? Just get an Intel GMA X3000 integrated motherboard [wikipedia.org] and save time, power, money and hassle due to Intel "getting it" and releasing Open Source drivers and full specs. (You'll probably also be able to benefit from their free wireless drivers.

    If you're into hardcore gaming then you're probably running a PS3 or an Xbox on the side anyway.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by dc29A (636871) *
      If you're into hardcore gaming then you're probably running a PS3 or an Xbox on the side anyway.

      Let me know when good RTS, MMO and strategy games come to consoles. Until then, I'll stick with my PC!
      • Sure. Run Windows and play those games on it, but that's irrelevant to a discussion of Linux drivers.
    • I don't think you should be looking at ATI or NVidia for the changes in the kernel that break the ABI.

      The kernel is intentionally difficult to upgrade or use for people who want to use binary drivers.

      • The kernel will always be a problem for closed-source software that stupidly relies on a stable ABI. The kernel intentionally stays flexible and changes rapidly in order to keep innovating. FL/OSS software has little problem rebuilding against it and staying innovative. That's why ATI and Nvidia will never be able to produce satisfactory drivers for Linux.

        That's exactly why it makes most sense to go with fully open hardware supported by FL/OSS drivers unless you want to either stick with old kernel vers

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by ceswiedler (165311) *
              Not for drivers, it's not. The Linux userspace API is extremely stable, and the ABI somewhat less so. But anything inside the kernel can change drastically. That's why Linux hackers want all drivers in the kernel tree, so they can find anything which breaks due to an API change, and fix the problems.

              • Re:Nvidia is not the competition (Score:4, Insightful)

                by kscguru (551278) on Monday June 04 2007, @09:28PM (#19390979)

                That's why Linux hackers want all drivers in the kernel tree, so they can find anything which breaks due to an API change, and fix the problems.
                And that's exactly why hardware manufacturers DON'T want their drivers to live in the kernel tree. They don't get:
                • Bug fix backports: Kernel hackers apply a patch to the latest vanilla kernel, then say backports are the distro's problem. Two distros do, fifteen don't, users of those fifteen scream at the hardware companies for having buggy drivers. With an out-of-tree driver, you just need to update the driver. Windows and OSX are light-years ahead of Linux here.
                • Community contributions: Kernel hackers only add GPLed code; very few even allow dual-license, and certain vocal hackers are zealously GPL-only (to the extent of rewriting code JUST to make it GPLed). Which means the hardware vendor can't take a fix from a linux driver and integrate it into a Windows driver without GPLing that too. The vendor has to either GPL all drivers (Windows included), or maintain two separate trees (GPL and non-GPL), or not open drivers at all. Guess which is easiest / cheapest?
                • Driver API stability: a modern 3D graphics driver is a full OS in its own right, with internal threading models, schedulers, memory management, context switches, etc.; a modern driver needs more than just bugfixes. Every good developer knows the way to keep two large codebases manageable is a stable API between them; the only people who don't seem to get this are otherwise-intelligent Linux kernel hackers [kroah.com].
                • Kernel API freedom: Kernel hackers like stable userspace APIs (for good reason). But hardware vendors don't need to provide stable APIs if they have a shim library that actually talks to the cards (e.g. atioglxx.dll, the ATI OpenGL implementation). It's a lot easier to let the API change rapidly and only commit to a stable API at the library interface (the OpenGL API).
                • Easier work. The Linux kernel development process is optimized for making the kernel hacker's life easier at the expense of the driver developer's (hint: saying "we'll update your driver for you" clashes very badly when the HW vendor is simultaneously making changes). If kernel hackers want to see better device drivers, they need to stop treating drivers as second-class citizens. Microsoft is very good at courting driver developers; Linux is the definition of arrogance.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by the_humeister (922869)
      Or you could use an R100, R200, or R300 based ATI card. They're not hard to find, relatively inexpensive, and still powerful enough for a casual gamer (at least R300s are, possibly R200). Oh, forgot to mention that they have mostly full open source drivers [freedesktop.org] written already.
      • Yes, that's another good option. Similarly the nouveau [freedesktop.org] project for reverse-engineering Nvidia's closed, proprietary, probably-infringing-patents hardware is coming along nicely. But ... if buying new hardware then the chance for the market to reward an OPEN piece of hardware and simultaneously save on power is too good an opportunity to miss. Intel are really doing the right thing right now and it would be good to see the market confirm their strategy.

    • Intel has not release docs (Score:5, Informative)

      by dmoore (2449) <david DOT moore AT gmail DOT com> on Monday June 04 2007, @12:03PM (#19383813)
      > Intel "getting it" and releasing Open Source drivers and full specs.

      Actually, Intel has not released docs for their GMA X3000. Their current stance is that the driver is the documentation. That's fine and good, except the driver is still very incomplete (missing OpenGL features, no XvMC, no tv-out, etc.). See here:

      http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2007-Ma y/024582.html [freedesktop.org]

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by crush (19364)
        That's interesting. Thanks for the link. Is there some productive way to pressure Intel and help them make the final step?
      • Only some. On the newer motherboards. See here [intellinuxgraphics.org]. Make your life easier and more productive. Sell the crap hardware from proprietary companies that haven't seen the new market conditions before it's too late.
  • Now, I don't pay much attention to video cards, but when I saw "FireGL" I thought "why would you need to optimize OpenGL graphics for Firefox?".

  • ATI and Fedora 7 / X.Org 1.3 (Score:5, Informative)

    by harrypelles (872287) on Monday June 04 2007, @11:20AM (#19383245)
    I made the same mistake as many [phoronix.net] Fedora users - jumping (to Fedora 7) before looking. I'm not poking at Fedora here, on the contrary, I am a loyal Fedora user. It's ATI I'm upset with. ATI released a new fglrx driver (version 8.37) since Fedora 7's tests and final release that also does not work with X.Org 1.3. We're all sitting around waiting for the 8.38 which ATI claims will be compatible. And don't even get me started on ATI's absent AIGLX support for Linux. My next card will nVidia.
    • Yah well, Nvidia is the lesser of the two evils... learned that before I left Windows. Talk with your dollars, it's the only language these companies understand.

      • Re:ATI and Fedora 7 / X.Org 1.3 (Score:5, Insightful)

        by drgonzo59 (747139) on Monday June 04 2007, @11:43AM (#19383553)
        The difference is that here Vista is to blame, while on Linuzz everyobody magically undarstand that this is a driver's problem.

        Perhaps because 'Linuzz' is open it is easy to see where the problem lies. With Vista you get huge binary blob and if it's broken you don't know if it is the drivers or Vista -- you can't debug it and look at the source so you call MS tech support and wait 6 months for a service pack or MS tells you to call ATI/AMD and you wait 6 month for a fix. Binary drivers suck that's the problem here...

  • Nothing to see here. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BESTouff (531293) on Monday June 04 2007, @11:27AM (#19383325) Homepage
    Basically, TFA says that "ATI has a release cycle". They even have an unofficial bugzilla and an unofficial wiki. Oh, and they'll drop R200 support too. And all that's supposed to make better drivers for Linux one day. I really wish they'd go the Intel way: hire some top-notch developers, give them specs and make them do Free drivers.
  • I've had three nvidia videocards (one that is onboard) and one ati.

    I've always had, and still have problems with them when I use the proprietary drivers under linux (Ubuntu/Debian/Slackware, both packed and from the nvidia site). A few months back I just gave up and stopped blaming it on the videocards and drivers since I seemed to be the only person whose screen froze up upon switching to terminal mode and back.

    The onboard videocard gives the same problems and I have exactly zero problems when using the sl
  • While I would love to help out in 3D graphics, but am in no way capable, I am also curious - how many competent 3D graphics hardware developers are there, really, outside of AMD, nVidia and a few other companies? What do they expect? A handful, dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of developers? Is it really that 'easy' so that they would benefit from from the Argus eye?

    --
  • WTC does this have to do with AMD?

    -Rick
  • I have to say I'm not finding anything insightful in the linked article. It's just a long winded way of saying, "The drivers aren't very good, but AMD/ATI is working hard on it." which we most of us likely already knew. It would have been good to see some insights on what AMD did to improve the driver development process, what impact the open source [slashdot.org] announcement made, etc.
  • Wow, a lot of text to paper over the obvious problem: ATI is still failing to release OSS drivers for Linux. The paper describes all the ways that ATI tries to avoid releasing the drivers, and how they all fail to solve the problem. ATI has testing processes, etc., sure - but later on, when X.org and the Linux kernel change, there's no way for me to update the driver - so I have to hope that they will EVENTUALLY do so (leaving me vulnerable to any security problems) OR throw away the ATI card.

    Dell has solved this problem by including the Intel stuff instead for their Linux offering. It's time for ATI to release their drivers as OSS.

  • nVidia blob isn't crap. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gukin (14148) on Monday June 04 2007, @01:05PM (#19384673)
    I know that lots of folks are vexed that nVidia won't open their 3D driver, saying "If nVidia stops supporting Linux you're all doomed." Well just who do you think supports the open source nv.c driver? How about the nVidia SATA driver? Yes, it's nVidia, so even though the 3D stuff is closed source, they're still supporting OSS.

    Next about the "Crap" drivers from nVidia, I've ordered a bunch of new Linux PCs, each will have a low-end nVidia video card added when it arrives? Why? Well I need dual headed support and that can be spotty with other video card vendors. I also need to run them in 8-bit color (don't ask, I just need to.) and my experience with the glorious wonderful OSS Intel video drivers is a nasty little box that follows the cursor around on the screen. I don't have ANY issues with nVidia's "Crap" drivers, everything looks great and works great.

    I applaud ANY vendor who makes efforts at supporting OSS but I buy stuff from vendors who support Linux. Every system I own is either an nForce mobo with an nVidia video card or is simply sporting an nVidia card. When asked about what to buy, I recommend nVidia products. They have the best quality 3D support and performance of ANY vendor (which isn't much), they make it possible for me to play games under Linux that I'd otherwise have to play under Windows and that is worth a lot to me.
      • Like McDonald's board of directors meeting over poor sales in India, clueless to the ethical views of that market. Sales VP: "They don't like our beef" Marketing VP: "So we'll give them better beef, fresher!" Technical VP: "We could slaughter the cow on site if it helps" Sales VP: "That could be a great slogan, 'fresh from the cow'" [cue standard nods of agreement and voicing of support from around the table]

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