ATI Proprietary Linux x86 Driver Version: 8.10.19 (released 2/16/2005) discussion

redsolar · Jan 31, 2005, 11:39 AM

We here at DriverHeaven hope that this forum will become a great hangout place for people who are currently running or are considering using Linux as their desktop OS, and use ATI hardware in their systems.

This thread is created for all of you to ask questions, and make constructive sugestions as to what has to be improved in ATI Linux Drivers, and why. Of course, many of you will say "give us more speed", that's all we care about, but there is a lot more to a good driver than just pure FPS. Think ease of installation, support of latest rendering schemes, etc etc etc. Your imagination (within reasonable bounds) is the limit.

This thread is set to do just that - become a collection of wishes from users to ATI.

NOTE: some of the best and most constructive questions may reach ATI Linux developers quite soon

(key word here will be "interview"

) so don't delay asking questions that are bothering you as soon as you feel like it.

[color=Red]PLEASE DO NOT POST YOUR SPECIFIC PROBLEMS OR SUPPORT REQUESTS IN THIS THREAD, USE THE "NEW THREAD" BUTTON IN THE FORUM[/color]. Let's keep this one for suggestions only, ok?

chucktdriscoll · Jan 31, 2005, 01:48 PM

Is there any hope of the fglrx driver being able to suspend properly soon? My problems are with swsusp2 in particular, but I'm pretty sure the problem is in the driver, not the suspend code.

go1dfish · Jan 31, 2005, 02:16 PM

A few questions:

How many people are currently working an linux driver development at ATI?

How many people were working on the linux driver development during the 3.x series of drivers.

Many have called for an opening of the driver source for both nvidia and ATI cards, but in the past nvidia and ATI have claimed this is not possible due to license agreements for some of the code used in the drivers. Is there any chance in at least a partial release of the driver code to the general public to help facilitate bug finding/fixing?

Are there any plans for a PPC/Linux driver since alot of the more common ppc hardware (macs) run ATI cards? Also the next generation xbox is supposed to run PPC and many hobbiest would like to run linux on that machine as well for things such as MythTV or game emulation.

Some of the newer hardware (9800 xt and above I believe) has auto clock scaling based on temperature, is there support, or do you plan to support this feature under linux in the future? (I do not own such a card, ive just never seen this asked or answered anywhere)

Any plans for support of all the ATI-AllInWonder card features?

How much testing do you do for the linux driver under dual head setups?

UberLord · Jan 31, 2005, 04:00 PM

Is full OpenGL 2.0 support planned? If so, what sort of ball-park finger-in-the-air timescale? Months? Years?

nVidia drivers bypass DRI to an extent as iirc they said it was too slow. ATI has gone the DRI route and there is currently a large performance gap between Linux drivers and Windows drivers on the same hardware. Is this just a driver problem or will ATI work with the community to improve DRI or both?

As the CCC is a .NET application, could it (or parts) be ported to GTK# + Mono? That would really give ATI an edge as it would have the same configuration screens regardless of OS - which would make customer (not consumer!) support easier.

Kombatant · Jan 31, 2005, 05:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by UberLord

IAs the CCC is a .NET application, could it (or parts) be ported to GTK# + Mono? That would really give ATI an edge as it would have the same configuration screens regardless of OS - which would make customer (not consumer!) support easier.

See Terry? I am not the only one with such ideas

Geminiwave · Jan 31, 2005, 08:11 PM

Currently I have only been able to properly install Catalyst drivers in Ubuntu(a flavor of Debian) with the synaptic package installer. I have tried with both Knoppix, and SuSE to install ATI drivers and it always fails(in the case of Knoppix, ruining the kernel for some inexplicable reason. oh well i was an idiot with linux back when I used Knoppix)

I was wondering how you plan on increasing compatibility between distros. Simply making something for "linux" is insufficiant...even making drivers for the major distros such as Red Had and Debian really isnt sufficiant either. Obviously writing seperate drivers for every flavor out there isnt reasonable...so how do you plan on deploying compatible drivers to the open source community and retaining compatibility?

redsolar · Jan 31, 2005, 08:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Geminiwave

Currently I have only been able to properly install Catalyst drivers in Ubuntu(a flavor of Debian) with the synaptic package installer. I have tried with both Knoppix, and SuSE to install ATI drivers and it always fails(in the case of Knoppix, ruining the kernel for some inexplicable reason. oh well i was an idiot with linux back when I used Knoppix)

I was wondering how you plan on increasing compatibility between distros. Simply making something for "linux" is insufficiant...even making drivers for the major distros such as Red Had and Debian really isnt sufficiant either. Obviously writing seperate drivers for every flavor out there isnt reasonable...so how do you plan on deploying compatible drivers to the open source community and retaining compatibility?

Which SuSE version? I have had no problems installing and running SuSE specific drivers in 9.1 or 9.2, which can be found on SuSE ftp. LInk here

ghost_zero · Feb 1, 2005, 04:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by UberLord

Is full OpenGL 2.0 support planned? If so, what sort of ball-park finger-in-the-air timescale? Months? Years?

nVidia drivers bypass DRI to an extent as iirc they said it was too slow. ATI has gone the DRI route and there is currently a large performance gap between Linux drivers and Windows drivers on the same hardware. Is this just a driver problem or will ATI work with the community to improve DRI or both?

As the CCC is a .NET application, could it (or parts) be ported to GTK# + Mono? That would really give ATI an edge as it would have the same configuration screens regardless of OS - which would make customer (not consumer!) support easier.

Soon that should work without any porting... because Mono's .net implementation has already all standard .net classes... what is missing currently are the Windows.Forms but they will be supported with v1.2 which should get released end of April or begin of May...

the only problem might be that there need to be done some changes to the service for the CCC... but the CCC probably will work without this then...

Geminiwave · Feb 1, 2005, 07:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by redsolar

Which SuSE version? I have had no problems installing and running SuSE specific drivers in 9.1 or 9.2, which can be found on SuSE ftp. LInk here

the built-in drivers worked, but they werent up to date. I tried downloading current drivers off ATI and it didnt work at all.

oh yeah and it was SuSE 9.1 afaik

redsolar · Feb 1, 2005, 07:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Geminiwave

the built-in drivers worked, but they werent up to date. I tried downloading current drivers off ATI and it didnt work at all.

oh yeah and it was SuSE 9.1 afaik

Did you read how to install SuSE drivers? They need a special kernel module prior to driver installation. If you try and follow this guide, you should have few to zero problems making it work. You have to follow every step of it though.

.

*mtippett* · Feb 1, 2005, 11:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Geminiwave

Currently I have only been able to properly install Catalyst drivers in Ubuntu(a flavor of Debian) with the synaptic package installer. I have tried with both Knoppix, and SuSE to install ATI drivers and it always fails(in the case of Knoppix, ruining the kernel for some inexplicable reason. oh well i was an idiot with linux back when I used Knoppix)

We have been working hard with distribution vendors to ensure that distribution specific packages are available shortly after release. We have coverage over quite a few distributions (suse, debian, gentoo, ubuntu, etc...) and am always looking for more distribution vendors that we can work with.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Geminiwave

I was wondering how you plan on increasing compatibility between distros. Simply making something for "linux" is insufficiant...even making drivers for the major distros such as Red Had and Debian really isnt sufficiant either. Obviously writing seperate drivers for every flavor out there isnt reasonable...so how do you plan on deploying compatible drivers to the open source community and retaining compatibility?

See above...

We have some more things happening in the background, more on this at a later date

.

Regards,

Matthew

black hole sun · Feb 3, 2005, 12:58 AM

Hey matt, few things;

1.) fglrx sometimes causes the system to crash when you log out of X (a solid black screen). You guys aware of this?

2.) How serious are you guys about the ATi bugzilla? Like, when you find the time do some of your devs go through the list and take a look at some of the bugs on there, find if they're valid, then discard them / note them as necessary?

I'll think of more and edit them in, later.

rinthos · Feb 3, 2005, 01:35 AM

Some questions i guess.

and of course, thanks for taking the time (as always) to respond to such posts etc, the community much appreciates it.

Q1: Also in regards to the resume from suspend issue, any idea when we can expect that resolved? (noticed in the driver release notes, so you guys are definately aware of it

).

Q2: In regards to the 2d driver, is any work being done on it, or is all focus being put on the 3d driver? (also in regards to the mouse-pointer-at-top-of-screen-jumping bug (listed on the bugzilla), can we see a resolution for that? it's just an annoyance so if it's on the back burner would be understood).

Q3: In a rage3d chat, you stressed the main focus of the driver development was on "stability" first, performance later. In regards to stability, what and how is that determined from your standpoint? I.e. some people have issues with system lockups, other people have run into memory leaks with certain applications and external agpgart, etc. What range of problems does "stability" cover, or is it limited solely to system lockups?

Q4: Do you think ATI pays you enough ?

(hey, gotta lighten the mood a bit)

Q5: You hinted to this previously, and also in this thread, but for users not running the latest-release distros (such as Suse 9.0, 9.1, Slackware 9, etc. the packages of the drivers released by the distro-vendors do not function properly, and the distros are pointing to the ati webpage, which sometimes the drivers there function, but at times on some distros they don't install without their own share of problems), so the question I guess is I understand that there's "some more things happening in the background" to address this issue, can you give us any information in terms of what that might be, and when we can expect these 'secrets' to solve our problems ?

Q6: Tippett, I think i spelled that correctly right?

Q7: Is there any time-table for ACPI support in the drivers? (hey, worth a shot, nvidia got it, maybe you guys have it planned?).

Q8: Any news on a new control panel/control center for linux users with more features etc? If so any time-frames? Any features we can look forward to being able to utilize?

Q9: When testing the Linux Catalyst drivers, what types of applications are they tested on? What emphasis is placed upon 'games' and what emphasis is placed upon development apps etc?

I think that's all i've got.

*phew*.
---

sc3252 · Feb 3, 2005, 01:42 AM

cool didnt even know i opened an acount here. to bad, i liked going to rage3d.

Q: There have been alot of questions about the stuttering in ut2004 and was interested if there would be a fix for this sometime in the forceable future?

Q:Also I have noticed in doom 3 that there are random hard locks(meaning everything is frozen and i cant do anything but click the power button) is there going to be a fix for this or is it only me?

I am not sure how to get a log for the this, I would be glad to post one after it freezes but dont know where to look.

The_Neon_Cowboy · Feb 3, 2005, 02:22 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by UberLord

As the CCC is a .NET application, could it (or parts) be ported to GTK# + Mono? That would really give ATI an edge as it would have the same configuration screens regardless of OS - which would make customer (not consumer!) support easier.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kombatant

See Terry? I am not the only one with such ideas

I under stand .Net can be ported to linux BUT what I assume there is probuly
a magor limitation. Linux has no "windows registry" like thing to use to set and
configure settings... does it? other wise a CCC like CP is pointless unless it gives
them more options and thing they can configure.... wich is a gripe I've herd from
quite a few linux users on the boards that they'd like more control/abilty to configure
like you can with windows...

(After bit I may dabble in linux again, I'm a noob when it comes to linux
and I tend to kill verry quickly some how "kernal panic" and can't figure out how to fix it other then wipe and begin again fresh. I've tried to conqer it several times it just doesn't like me so i'll be trying several distrobutions and try my luck there... I've been trying linux mandrake since like ages ago....But I fell over welemded goinmg from just about knowing it all with windows to what the heack am I doing in linux...)

MrIch2010 · Feb 3, 2005, 02:58 AM

We need better IGP9100 support.

3d support on tvout
tvout without a hack of the 3.12 driver
clone mode support

and so on... please spend some time in supporting IGP9100

Kombatant · Feb 3, 2005, 04:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The_Neon_Cowboy

I under stand .Net can be ported to linux BUT what I assume there is probuly
a magor limitation. Linux has no "windows registry" like thing to use to set and
configure settings... does it?

It's called GConf. Google it

Quote:

(After bit I may dabble in linux again, I'm a noob when it comes to linux and I tend to kill verry quickly some how "kernal panic" and can't figure out how to fix it other then wipe and begin again fresh. I've tried to conqer it several times it just doesn't like me so i'll be trying several distrobutions and try my luck there... I've been trying linux mandrake since like ages ago....But I fell over welemded goinmg from just about knowing it all with windows to what the heack am I doing in linux...)

Patience young grasshopper

Any questions you have, post them and I am certain someone will respond.

RIV@NVX · Feb 3, 2005, 05:43 AM

Will there be a schedule for Linux drivers in such way as Windows drivers (I mean, will it have time-based releases ex. every three months or will it be released every so often?)

md5 · Feb 3, 2005, 07:36 AM

linuxconf is really good too

http://www.solucorp.qc.ca/linuxconf/

Kombatant · Feb 3, 2005, 07:46 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RIV@NVX

Will there be a schedule for Linux drivers in such way as Windows drivers (I mean, will it have time-based releases ex. every three months or will it be released every so often?)

If I am not mistaken, since the Linux drivers were put under the Catalyst umbrella, ATI has commited to 6 releases per year. That's roughly one release every two months

UberLord · Feb 3, 2005, 10:48 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The_Neon_Cowboy

I under stand .Net can be ported to linux

.NET has already been ported under two flavours - Mono and GNU dotnet
Personally, I prefer Mono

Quote:

BUT what I assume there is probuly
a magor limitation. Linux has no "windows registry" like thing to use to set and
configure settings... does it?

With GNOME there is GConf (as Kombatant already pointed out)

But the settings you are alluding to are commonly held in /etc/X11/xorg.conf - however root access is required to edit this file.

I'm sure that it would be possible to have settings defined on a per user basis though.

redsolar · Feb 3, 2005, 11:12 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by UberLord

I'm sure that it would be possible to have settings defined on a per user basis though.

Amen to that!

.