Quote: Original post by Alastair Gould
Both ATI and INTEL have open source drivers. The ati ones are still been worked on and due to replace closed source drivers onced finshed.

ATIs opensource driver is a 'dumbed down' version, which does not include the most cutting edge features, and is significantly slower than the closed source one. This is no serious alternative.

Quote: Original post by Alastair Gould
They can't simply open source the current closed source drivers because it contains code develeped by another company.

That's only one part of the story. The other part is that ATI doesn't want to expose internal details of their newest GPU architecture (and many details of that architecture can be RE'ed if you have the driver source) to the competition.

Quote: Original post by Alastair Gould
The major one left is nvidia. Then were sorted.

You will never get an open source driver from Nvidia. Ever. Trust me on that.

In a interview with a AMD develeper

The conclusions he came to is that the open source drive will "satisfy the majority of user's needs"

and the open source driver will be "80% of the value with 10% of the code"

Here it is http://www.beyond3d.com/content/interviews/43/1

And since AMD released all the Registers and specifications for the latest RadeonHD GPU's in pdf form to develop this driver(Go over wiki.x.org/ if you want them), I don't think the arhectecture one really matters

Heres the link to GPU regs, and specs http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/

There 900 pages long though.

This allows some of the clever open source euthusatic Phd bothins to come up with optimisations of there own.

[Edited by - Alastair Gould on December 12, 2007 6:00:18 PM]

The other interesting thing about the opensource driver issue is the fact that some of the people working on the drivers have to sign NDA's in order to get access to technical docs. So even though the drivers are opensource, large parts of them are a black box that only people with access to the technical docs can interpret. This kind of negates a lot of the value that comes from an open driver. Oh well, I suppose something is better than nothing.

No the they only needed the NDA before they released those doc's, the docs had to go through AMDs legal department. The NDA's were so they could get a headstart in develepement. They don't need them anymore, since the tech doc's have been released.

i.e the pdfs are here http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/
42589_rv630_rrg_1.01o.pdf is the one main rv600 archtecture by the looks of things, from the filename.

I hear word that there might be more documents to come although.

Quote: Original post by Alastair Gould
No the they only needed the NDA before they released those doc's, the docs had to go through AMDs legal department. The NDA's were so they could get a headstart in develepement. They don't need them anymore, since the tech doc's have been released.

i.e the pdfs are here http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/
42589_rv630_rrg_1.01o.pdf is the one main rv600 archtecture by the looks of things, from the filename.

I hear word that there might be more documents to come although.

I'm not talking about AMD specifically, I've just noticed this kind of thing before with opensource drivers. It is really cool that AMD released those docs though.

Quote: Original post by FILO
I'm not talking about AMD specifically, I've just noticed this kind of thing before with opensource drivers. It is really cool that AMD released those docs though.

Maybe they hope that the OSS community will write better drivers than the horrific ones they inherited with the aquisition of ATI. It's essentially a way to get hard work done for free. From a business perspective, that is an interesting concept. From a technical perspective however, I sure hope that this won't backfire badly. When you look at the quality of most OS software around (yeah yeah, there are a few exceptions, I know), then goodbye ATI/AMD... NVidia would laugh their asses off.

I don't get this whole open source thing with respect to drivers. Graphics drivers are difficult to write and hard to maintain. When I buy a piece of hardware, I want it to work with the advertised operating systems, period. This means, that it is the manufacturers responsability to deliver drivers for the operating systems they claim to work with. Who the hell cares if the drivers are open or closed source, as long as they work.

Quote: Original post by Yann L
I don't get this whole open source thing with respect to drivers. Graphics drivers are difficult to write and hard to maintain. When I buy a piece of hardware, I want it to work with the advertised operating systems, period. This means, that it is the manufacturers responsability to deliver drivers for the operating systems they claim to work with. Who the hell cares if the drivers are open or closed source, as long as they work.

Amen.

There are already plenty of other areas in which Linux can bug a person; trying to get 3D on the screen doesn't need to be another one.

Its mainly because the community will update them so they won't fall behind Kernel versions, and X server versions. So it will surport the latest features of X11 eg AIGLX. They will be able to be included by defult which means Linux can have 3d accel without going through all crap to get it to work. It will just be automatic.

So opensource will make it much easier to get 3d working. as its working from defualt. i.e Imagine loading linux and 3d works automatically

I write a few drivers, as I'm a electronics dev. I've noticed a lot of drivers can end up as lumps of code. and i've noticed open source drivers tend be nice state maschine driven drivers for the wi-fi cards(Seems to be a fashion).

Quote: Original post by Yann L

Quote: Original post by FILO
I'm not talking about AMD specifically, I've just noticed this kind of thing before with opensource drivers. It is really cool that AMD released those docs though.

Maybe they hope that the OSS community will write better drivers than the horrific ones they inherited with the aquisition of ATI. It's essentially a way to get hard work done for free. From a business perspective, that is an interesting concept. From a technical perspective however, I sure hope that this won't backfire badly. When you look at the quality of most OS software around (yeah yeah, there are a few exceptions, I know), then goodbye ATI/AMD... NVidia would laugh their asses off.

I don't get this whole open source thing with respect to drivers. Graphics drivers are difficult to write and hard to maintain. When I buy a piece of hardware, I want it to work with the advertised operating systems, period. This means, that it is the manufacturers responsability to deliver drivers for the operating systems they claim to work with. Who the hell cares if the drivers are open or closed source, as long as they work.

Well open source drivers and linux are important because they allow you to make minor changes to recompile the driver to work with the latest version of the operating system/x. Its not nice having to use buggy old libraries on linux or back port programs just to support an essential piece of hardware.

A real life example: I needed to get dual screen working with debian, a mini kontron motherboard and two lvds screens using a ADD2-LVDS-DUAL PCI-Express Digital Display Card. The graphics chip on the board was from intel. Kontron (the board vendor) said that they supported dual screen under linux but that I would have to use a binary driver from intel which was closed source.

The closed source driver only worked with xorg 6.7, had a 150 page install instruction document, required me to use an ancient version of redhat and said that I had to build all of X from scratch.

If I had gone down this path it would mean that the application I was developing to use dual screen with linux would have to be built with old buggy libraries. The authors of those libraries probably would offer me little to no support with any problems I encountered during development due to the fact that I would be using an old version of there code.

Anyway, a quick google around reveled that no one seemed to use this driver and everyone used the driver developed by: http://intellinuxgraphics.org/

I installed the latest version of debian and tried to get dual screen working. Now, nobody had tested dual screen and the opendriver and my particular ADDS card. It didn't work. I was able to get it working in a day or two with some help from the kind folks over at xorg.

Moral of the story, Open source graphics drivers saved me a lot of pain.

Quote: Original post by Alastair Gould
Its mainly because the community will update them so they won't fall behind Kernel versions, and X server versions. So it will surport the latest features of X11 eg AIGLX. They will be able to be included by defult which means Linux can have 3d accel without going through all crap to get it to work. It will just be automatic.

So opensource will make it much easier to get 3d working. as its working from defualt. i.e Imagine loading linux and 3d works automatically

I write a few drivers, as I'm a electronics dev. I've noticed a lot of drivers can end up as lumps of code. and i've noticed open source drivers tend be nice state maschine driven drivers for the wi-fi cards(Seems to be a fashion).

Snap ;)