ATI Releases Drivers for XFree 4.3.0 428
Kyouryuu writes "ATI has finally released official drivers for XFree 4.3.0 and updated their Linux drivers to 3.7.0 for supported XFree versions, several months after the originally proposed release date of April last year. Although Schneider Digital has previously made available unofficial drivers, Linux users who have ATI Radeon cards can now benefit from an official release. Unfortunately, ATI still insists on using RPM exclusively and keeping the drivers closed source."
Re:closed source != bad always (Score:4, Insightful)
Clearly software engineers would not be able to help this at all and you're definately not trolling. I mean, duh!
Re:closed source != bad always (Score:5, Insightful)
It's about control, nothing more, nothing less.
well... (Score:3, Insightful)
1) I have a Radeon card in a Gentoo system. Gentoo doesn't use RPMs.
2) What if ATI has linked it against the wrong library version?
3) What if I get an Opteron?
Re:closed source != bad always (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if we don't count idiological issues, closed source drivers mean numerous annoyances to the users.
For example:
Re:closed source != bad always (Score:2, Insightful)
Graphics cards that have gone 'end-of-life' in the past have been dropped by the XFree86 team themselves. An example is the S3 Trio chipset cards. Sure, an ambitious hacker could forward-port support themselves. However, this points out that 'free software' people abandon hardware as well, rendering it worthless to anybody but the most diligent.
Why ATI? (Score:1, Insightful)
I would rather buy products of other companies who sympathize with the open source community.
Re:closed source != bad always (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why ATI? (Score:2, Insightful)
No suprise here (Score:3, Insightful)
no Linux PPC support? (Score:4, Insightful)
Thanks.
CBV
umm, theese are old. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why ATI? (Score:1, Insightful)
The real question is: (Score:4, Insightful)
To be honest, I don't give a damn if drivers are closed, open or whatnot, as long as they actually work and properly use the cards features.
That the Nvidia drivers are tied to the kernel is anoying, but bearable since they actually do work. Nvidias Linux support has been next to none - they've got high karma with me.
From ATI though, I've heard only negative stuff. Same from Matrox, whos Linux support seems to be an utter joke.
Can anybody confirm or debunk this about the new ATI drivers?
Re:closed source != bad always (Score:5, Insightful)
> understand, let alone improve,
I get to stare at "professional" code every day. It is nothing like what was in the textbooks. There is acres of room for improvement. silly little things like something called a buffer overflow are present in many of the implementations. I cannont believe my eyes somedays, and it's a wonder that the product that this certain company puts out, functions at all. It is under the cover of closed-source that these things are allowed to persist, and will probably never change. The company just keeps issuing patches and revisions and fixes what is terminally broken. Futhermore, the only reason these "bugs" exist is simply do to human laziness; something that could be overcome by another simple human, with the right principles, without an "intimate knowlege" of the hardware.
Re:closed source != bad always (Score:3, Insightful)
But you could replace PPC with any non ati supported platform: AMD64, MIPS, ALPHA, SPARC, whatever-commes-next-week.
Jeroen
Re:closed source != bad always (Score:3, Insightful)
There may be others, but those are sufficient for me. I won't be paying for high end cards. I've had too much experience with closed source applications breaking with system patches & upgrades. If that's likely to happen, I'm no longer willing to fork out a wad of cash.
Re:closed source != bad always (Score:5, Insightful)
I design hardware for a living, and you are wrong. There is no real benefit to hiding your hardware internals from the rest of the world. It's a knee-jerk PHB thing. It has no bearing on reality.
If you are scared of your competitors, then hiding your hardware internals costs them maybe a week, because:
1) They know how to do everything you do, anyway.
2) What they don't know they can figure out in under a week, if they put an engineer or two on it. The delta between what they do and what you do is minimal, and anything they want to know is trivial to reverse engineer.
There might be "IP" issues, which usually means there is stuff in there protected by a stupidly restrictive license with another company. In my experience, the IP usually isn't worth the bother, or if it is, the license is only restrictive because lawyers simply assume it has to be. They come from a zero sum world, and never think of any other possibilities unless you start witholding cookies.
Usually, being closed will cost your partners much more than a week - they don't just want to learn what you did, they need to interface to it, and that is _hard_. It requires much better information than simply figuring out a trick your competitor used.
I will say it again: It is very rare and unlikely that closing your software helps in a situation like this.
Why buy Ati? (Score:2, Insightful)
You see, a vast majority of people buy better graphic cards in order to make video games running on the Windows operating system run better. Whether or not the drivers are open source does not matter to this vast majority. What matters is price and performance.
You can get a Radeon 9600XT 256MB for roughly $170. This card performs as well as a $300 nVidia card. Other Radeon cards, such as the 9700, perform better than their $50-$75 more expensive nVidia counterparts.
I am an open source proponent. I push Linux at work and at play. But, I know that open source has its place, and frankly, it shouldn't matter to anyone if a graphics card manufacturer opens up their drivers or not. If that irrelevant fact actually bothers you, than the issue lies within you, not the company.
Re:closed source != bad always (Score:3, Insightful)
Or you can continue to use the older driver and software. People who are using a machine in production as opposed to a toy have few compelling reasons to "upgrade" bugfixes notwithstanding, if their current platform is doing its job.
So, yes, open-source developers "abandon hardware" too, but that doesn't leave the hardware owner stranded which is not the case for hardware that only has closed source drivers.
Re:closed source != bad always (Score:4, Insightful)
First of all, the ideas and low level details of the hardware's functionality should be available to those who pay money for the card. If those ideas are advances in human knowledge, they can be patented and then the competitors can't copy them. If they aren't, then why should we give up access to them ? We aren't getting new research in return. Keeping these things secrete is giving up something (access and control) with out getting anything (investment in new research and technology) in return. I find it saddening that someone can post a knee-jerk defence of secrecy, invoking only "competitors" as a reason, and get modded up. Slashdot should have moved beyond this by now.
I stopped buying NVidia chips precisely because of their closed source drivers. You see, the reason why NVidia and now ATI go closed source is that much of their work is actually software, not hardware, work. The implementation of the functionality which is NOT on the card, but in the driver, matters a lot. NVidia was well known far having good cards simply because the software implementation of certain OpenGL fucntions was excellent. If they released the source, those would be copied by all other graphics drivers -- and then NVidia would have to compete on the quality of their hardware, which is exactly what they don't want to have to do and what is in our best interest for them to do.
By allowing more and more functionality in secrete non-Free drivers, you are essentially allowing your system to gradually become a proprietary OS with a bunch of cheap hardware dongles hanging on it. This is what Apple does.
You say "It is naive to think that you could even understand, let alone improve, what the engineers - who know the hardware intimately - have written?" Apart from the fact that your question mark is on a sentence that is not a queston, this shows a naive and uninformed view of technical history. It shows you are the kind of person who looks at computing as a matter of reading Tom's Hardware and applying your "informed" reasoning to picking components off a shelf and plugging them together.
Perhaps you would be happier with a Mac. Then you could have a unix-like operating system, with about as much freedom as you care about, and an ATI card to boot.
Re:Why ATI? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:closed source != bad always (Score:1, Insightful)
Why do you need to port to sparc, or alpha, or anything else? Last time I checked, I didn't think there was a linux PPC port of quake III.
Dunno. I have nvidia cards all around. I don't do anything that requires 3d acceleration.
I know you want the option and everything, and you want to keep the kernel "pure", and all that bullshit, but seriously, you don't need 3d support. If you wanna play games, you're gonna get a windows box anyhow.
Don't make me sound like a windows lover or anything, I'm just being realistic.
Nonsense (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:closed source != bad always (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:closed source != bad always (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because the software is free doesn't mean it's worse. Plenty of us, myself included prefer it over OSX which is just a resource intensive pig with a poor UI, bad cli, and missing key parts of the unix system.
confusing the meaning of free again? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's relevent regardless of the price of either
software or hardware.
Cost-as-in-money is not everything.
Re:closed source != bad always (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, let's use the term "open source" here so that you can't play ignorant about the two totally different meanings of "free" anymore.
Apple hardware is generally pretty high-quality (and especially the laptops' quality/price ratio is quite good). There are people who both appreciate Apple hardware and don't want to use any proprietary software.
And as someone pointed out earlier, PPC is not the only platform left out.
Re:closed source != bad always (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:closed source != bad always (Score:4, Insightful)
The improvement is not what most people want, they want the ability to easily support their graphics card. When Nvidia/ATI moves on to the next release of hardware do you think they are going to want to support the current stuff?
Re:The real question is: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Whay has RPM got to do with anything? (Score:2, Insightful)
Closed source -> Bad!
You're young, aren't you? Aaah, I remember being young and naive, when everything was simple and was black and white.
And how, exactly, are people supposed to know what in the hell "alien" is, that is exists, and how to use it?
Re:closed source != bad always (Score:2, Insightful)
I dont know why so many people use that argument. Its pretty much BS. ATI and Nvidia have totally different archetectures in how their cards do graphics. I dont remember the exact differences right now, but it would be very difficult to incorporate anything you learned from one's drivers into the other's products. Also there is this little thing called patents that would also stop such a theft. Im sure ATI has patents on all the intresting parts of its products that would keep nvidia from stealing them.
The main reason for ATI not open sourcing their drivers is plain and simple; its that corprate mentality of not giving away anything for free. Im not arguing that thats wrong or anything, its their driver to do what they want with, but just recognize the real reason for what they are doing. ATI is a corporation and Im sure if enough people sent emails saying how much they loved their ATI cards and how much it would make them love their ATI cards even more, and buy more of the beloved cards, if they had good high quality open sourced drivers to run their cards. Im sure ATI would open source the drivers if it got enough such emails. Isnt that how people got them to produce linux drivers and give specs to developers in the first place?
OpenGL is used for more than games! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's used for 3D modelling, for which there are a few open source applications now. It can be used for some extreme 2D accelleration, too.
Displaying HD video will make many a XVideo overlay driver puke. Using OpenGL instead may work, and in some cases work faster.
Do I here someone saying "No one uses Linux for video, and certainly not HD"? You're wrong. Of course, the kind of shit we have to put up with from NVidia and ATI (and Matrox, too, I think) makes Linux a marginal choice for such applications.
The apologists are just too willing to defend the hardware manufacturers because they provided drivers for their platform. Anybody using another platform must be weird, eh? Anybody using hw-accelerated GL for something else than gaming is weird, too, of course.
Empathising with weird* people is hard, I know. But it won't hurt if you try.
* People with other interests than you
Re:However, open source == better bug finding/fixi (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:closed source != bad always (Score:2, Insightful)
GNU/Linux is about 'open source', deal with it. If you don't care, go use Windows (or OSX, or Solaris, or
Not about stealing the technology (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine actually looking at the comments of code that's designed for internal use at ATI... this goes way beyond reverse engineering. I'm sure the code for the drivers says all sorts of helpful things like "we use a 24-bit number here because we've committed to 24-bit floating point for the R-V4xx line in the forseeable future..."
That's a naive and simple example, but it demonstrates the concept. There's way more in that code than just the variables and algorithms you get from reverse-engineering. Stripping out all sensitive comments to open-source the drivers is an insane amount of work.
Once you have that information, sure, it's too late to incorporate it into your cards. nVidia isn't going to say "cancel the tape-out! we just read the comments in the new open-source driver!" But it might give their marketing people a lead on how to spin things. Open-source mean openness in more than source, and I can understand any conventional company being loathe to give in to that.
Re:Non-OSS arguments don't hold water (Score:5, Insightful)
"Suppose you create and design feature X into your chipset. You might find, via a lawsuit, that feature X is patented by company Y. I've talked to vendors who would like to open their hardware but are scared to do so for this very reason -- they might have designed a patented feature into their hardware without realizing it."
Insults (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:closed source != bad always (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll assume the first, and attempt to educate you. I've already pissed off a bunch of people who instead provided the usual whiny /. repsonse to your (possibly unintiontional) troll, so I figure I better piss off the rest. wheee!
I value my time far to much to fully answer this one, but there are many reasons [dwheeler.com] for preferring open source: philosophy [gnu.org], practicality [opensource.org], curiosity and quality are four of the biggest. This is, frankly, mostly an argument made by marketing and PHBs (and people who just plain don't know any better, but I repeat myself). The fact is, they can and they will. They have no choice if they want to ship a product. Rest assured that, to the extent that they care to, NVIDIA knows lots about the low level details of the ATI designs. Having the source to the drivers would be a small bit of help, but, frankly, things move so fast that by the time a competitor could reverse engineer ATI's current feature set and figure out a way to integrate sait technology into their own, ATI would have rolled on to the next level. The architectures of the leading solutions are sufficiently different that reverse engineering the competitor is of primarily academic value (and perhaps a bit of marketing). Both ATI and NVIDIA have some of the best engineers in the world on their teamsHTH HAND
or not
Re:closed source != bad always (Score:5, Insightful)
Because when nVidia wants to know something about ATI drivers it's only slightly less trivial to get the information when the driver source is closed than open.
The GNU GPL [fsf.org] is about 15 years old now. That's precisely the kind of software abuse it's made for. If ATI released its drivers under the GPL, nVidia would have to do the same to copy any code from the ATI drivers.
Drivers aren't (supposed to be) what you pay for when you buy a piece of hardware; you pay for the hardware. The common excuse to keep drivers closed-source isn't the one quoted above; the concern is (supposedly) that ATI is afraid nVidia will notice architectural advantages of the Radeon series and integrate those into its hardware.
But what's the big deal? From drawing board to mass production is a matter of years; by the time a driver is released it's too late for the competition to integrate design ideas into its current product line.
What would open-source drivers bring, then? They'd bring the competition back to where it belongs: the hardware. Is GeForce or Radeon design better for most games? Nobody knows -- the driver hides how good the chips themselves are. (Personally, I'm under the impression ATI's chips are more powerful and their drivers are garbage.) Open-source drivers and open specs would benefit any company that released them; they'd also benefit the customer. And what if all hardware companies saw the light and released open-source drivers and open specs? Then they'd still compete much as they do today, and their customers would be better off.
Re:Just because you support an open source OS... (Score:2, Insightful)