The Letter That Started AMD's Open-Source Strategy 92
An anonymous reader writes "In marking the fourth anniversary of AMD's open-source strategy for their Radeon graphics, Phoronix has published the letter that launched this open-source effort. It was a letter written by Novell SUSE X engineers and submitted to AMD management with their open-source proposal."
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obvious troll is obvious.
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Even their closed-source driver sucks, it's not just the open source one.
Re:Lol open sores (Score:4, Insightful)
The OSS driver works pretty good for antique hardware. Unfortunately, it doesn't work very well for anything vaguely modern, while fglrx pretty much doesn't support anything more than a few years old (and it does more or less suck.) Consequently, if you have anything but the fanciest (unless it's very very new) or shabbiest ATI card, you can expect it to suck rocks through straws on Linux. nVidia is better but shares many of the same flaws. However, middle-aged hardware is well-supported by the official driver, and amazingly old hardware is supported as well. That makes support much easier, and while shopping for older computers with Linux compatibility in mind, it makes avoiding ATI a no-brainer as well. This reduction in resale value causes me to value ATI less up front... But to the masses who will never run Linux on a desktop, it's fairly irrelevant. Most people don't buy used hardware.
Anyone want to buy a P4 desktop with an ATI Rage Pro in it? It runs Ubuntu just fine :)
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The tearing on the secondary display is present in every card. I've had it since my first GeForce2 MX 10 years ago, GF4MX, GF 5200, 7300GT, 6150 IGP, intel GMA950 (i think), and now with Intel Core i5 on-CPU graphics. Seen it with VGA, DVI, Component, and HDMI outs. The secondary display always has tearing. That's why I have to switch primary/secondary screens when I want to watch a movie on my TV.
Not sure how it is in AMD land, but on nVidia and Intel, that's what it's like.
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in AMD land you get some minor screen tearing but on all displays. At least that is my experience with a 4200HD (on board) and a dedicated 6850HD.
It isn't a showstopper though and thus I haven't tried to fix it.
The above goes for all driver editions radeon, fglrx, mesa-dri-[a-z]{3,8}-exp.*
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I sure wish my X1250 hardware would work. I have a subnotebook on which I can only run Vista because of drivers. It has R690M chipset and L110 CPU and it's generally poorly supported under linux, the power scaling stuff doesn't work right either.
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There are some hardware solutions that suck so bad you wouldn't want Linux on their anyways.
- Dan.
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In capabilities the graphics are worlds ahead of anything from intel. And the CPU is also pissed off. It works great under Vista. I get 4:30 battery life (no, really) and everything works, I can play games, whatever. Under Windows 7 I get 2:30 battery life, and many games blow up the driver. Under Linux I get 1:30 battery life and even with RenderAccel, GLX etc disabled I get trashing of the display whether I use vesa or ati.
AMD royally screwed the pooch on Linux support for R690M and L110 and I am forced t
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Question: Have you tried SIW to find out what the exact chips you are running that are having Win 7 driver problems, and then replacing them with an updated driver from another model with the same chip?
Yep. I searched long and hard to find a driver that would work, and finally did. On the second resume from suspend, I get a free reboot. There is no improved power saving driver, either.
You just have to remember that with Windows there is ALWAYS more than one way to skin a cat.
The cat is a lie.
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You probably got modded down for insisting there is a solution. Of course I tried the Vista driver. I tried over a half-dozen drivers. Just finding one willing to install was a bit of a nightmare. And I must add that I never did get a driver to charge my Motorola cellphone even, and I tried like ten of those that said they would work. Windows 7 is a bit of a driver nightmare.
When I tell you that the CPU is Athlon L110 and the chipset is R690M I have told you literally everything you need to know, because th
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my amd fusion e-350 begs to differ on that. it works very well on the foss drivers.
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I do. Or rather, I did...
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SAMBA845V-24-4-R&cat=SYS [geeks.com]
At that price, it's a great deal. Start a kickstart install of CentOS5.x, and deliver it to customers who need a bunch of office desktops, terminals, etc. These days, you can spend a lot of money to get super-efficient components, and still end up drawing more power, and making much more noise (above PC idles at under 40watts,
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Consider that the "binary blob" in most drivers is in reality the firmware for the card, without which it's a fairly dull FPGA with maybe some spiffy maths goodness tacked on.
Now, how exactly does that differ from the closed binary firmware in your hard disk, or keyboard, or mouse?
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Exactly
Stallmantitis is ridiculous.
YOUR COMPUTER requires a non-trivial amount of closed-source information. It doesn't matter if it's in hardware or software.
And of course the 1st post is a troll, it's anonymous.
Re:And still after four years... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well now it doesn't _require_ firmware to be closed-source. And my understanding was that typically, devices that absolutely require firmware to even work at all, well those would be the cheap corner-cutters a-la WinModem - an unfortunate plague in the hardware industry. Really, if that's where we are, then motherboards might as well just give us a thousand socketed general-purpose output pins, and we'll push on whatever connectors we want and turn the whole thing into a glorified FPGA emulator.
There's always this pendulum swing - shitty mfgs push more functionality into SW/FW, things get too slow, so along comes a bright-eyed new guy with real hardware again, that runs nice and fast. Then the new guy falls in love with money, starts peddling garbage again, and the cycle repeats.
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Funny you mention WinModems. They are so simple the exactly opposite is true. They usually don't require a firmware (since it's the tiniest amount of hw to plug your computer to a phone line). On the other hand, a 'upload when using' fw for a 'Hard modem' would make lots of sense (this is used on some DSL USB Modems)
But yeah, it doesn't have to be closed source, still, I'm doubting Intel is releasing their processor's VHDL/Verilog files any time soon...
There's always this pendulum swing - shitty mfgs push more functionality into SW/FW, things get too slow, so along comes a bright-eyed new guy with real hardware again, that runs nice and fast. Then the new guy falls in love with money, starts peddling garbage again, and the cycle repeats.
Correct, but Moore's law is very helpful for money love
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Well now it doesn't _require_ firmware to be closed-source. And my understanding was that typically, devices that absolutely require firmware to even work at all, well those would be the cheap corner-cutters a-la WinModem
I think you have some fundamental misunderstanding of what firmware is and does. Your CPU contains firmware to implement x86 instructions. Your HDD contains firmware to implement the ATA protocol. In fact, pretty much every piece of equipment including your motherboard and graphics card too depends on firmware, they typically all have a level between the instructions and the hardware. The only real difference is whether it's stored on the device itself or loaded by the driver during initialization.
The crazy
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YOUR COMPUTER requires a non-trivial amount of closed-source information. It doesn't matter if it's in hardware or software.
It matters from a practical perspective. If there is a bug in open software, then you can fix it. If some driver threatens the stability of your system, then you can do something about it. You can't really do that if you find a hardware bug, though you might be able to work around it in software. If the open software suffers bitrot then you can update it to the latest APIs. You can't really do that with closed software. Open source software gives a skilled programmer the ability to fix pretty much any probl
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Most do, but a few run Coreboot.
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AMEN Brother!
Except there's this as well to worry... http://www.coreboot.org/Embedded_controller [coreboot.org]
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Those and datasheets with half truths are a real issue.
The other side is that AMD actively contributes :-)
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Stallmantitis is ridiculous.
Mod +1 Insightful.
I've been a FOSS developer for 10 years, but I still think RMS is crazier than a shithouse rat.
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Drivers, on the other hand, bind your hardware to a specific operational environment, and limit your freedom to use the hardware in any wa
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No. The binary firmware is software and updatable just like any other software. When the software is not freely distributable, when you can't modify it's source, and when you can't distribute your modifications, then that software is not free-as-in-freedom.
You can't be in compliance with the GPL if you distribute an operating system with such proprietary binaries. This is problematic because some hardware these days require firmware to be loaded by the operating system. That's why distributions like Debian
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You can distribute a GPL operating system containing non-free firmware. Linux is GPL and still it comes with firmware blobs inside its source code tarball. Debian are very strict GPL observers, yet they distribute an unsupported CD containing non-free firmware ( http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/ [debian.org] ).
The problem is when the firmware, beyond being non-free, is not even redistributable. In that
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You can distribute a GPL operating system containing non-free firmware.
You can, but you won't be in compliance with the GPL if you do. Just because people ignore the rules out of practicality doesn't mean the rules aren't being broken.
Debian are very strict GPL observers, yet they distribute an unsupported CD containing non-free firmware
Interesting. I wasn't aware that they were doing this. It is, of course, a compromise on their principles. They went through a big effort [debian.org] to get firmware out of main and into non-free after years of compromising for the sake of practicality.
It looks like they are trying to rationalize this CD as an "unofficial" net install CD only. It might even
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Depends on if anyone would ever consider changing the firmware. I'd say yes, it's free enough unless there was some good reason to ever change the firmware which there probably isn't.
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The first few posts might be trollish but look at the original article. It's a puff-piece wrapping AMD in the open source flag as a paragon of virtue when the truth is far less rosy.
AMD enjoys a (largely unearned) reputation on Slashdot as being the scrappy underdogs who want to save the world for Open Source or something like that. People forget that AMD is (or was) a multi-billion company that has no problems with getting patents, cozying up with Microsoft (see Jerry Sanders testifying in favour
Re:Firts 4 comments read like trolls (Score:4, Insightful)
The difference there is that Intel doesn't have any IP in this area worth protecting.
Also, what you're conveniently ignoring is that most of the source that AMD has came from ATI and was prior to the change in strategy. It's not easy to go back and retroactively open source things for which you may or may not already have the rights. I'm guessing that there's probably a fair amount of other people's IP involved. And even if there isn't, the legal team does still need to go through and make sure that they aren't going to be sued for releaseing something they shouldn't.
two is company, three is "every else" (Score:2, Interesting)
The "what have you done for me lately" crowd has an interesting way with words that never fails to amuse me.
Everyone else? There are three horses in this race, and a few ticks hitched to the feathers surrounding the coffin bone. 90% of the cells in the human body are bacterial. Sometimes you have to integrate over quorum.
Intel isn't especially huffed about offloadin
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Holy crap! Van Drashek has come to Slashdot! He even has a 5 digit UID! You keep working on whatever quasi-functional AI program that spews out all that crap is! One of these decades you might be able to spew out a halfway coherent troll post.
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>>90% of the cells in the human body are bacterial
Modern urban legend that isn't even vaguely true.
Ask yourself - if you take a powerful wide-spectrum antibiotic, do you suddenly drop from your natural 400 pounds down to 40?
>>The "what have you done for me lately" crowd has an interesting way with words that never fails to amuse me.
Does AMD actually have a decent driver for their family of video cards for Linux?
The irony of TFA is that it's apparently been 4 years since they committed to open so
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by count you have more bacteria than cells read this : http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080603085914.htm [sciencedaily.com]
please cite your sources....
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>>by count you have more bacteria than cells read this : http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080603085914.htm [sciencedaily.com]
Right, I've read that article before. Just because it's on the internet doesn't mean it's true.
It doesn't say where all these bacteria are supposed to be living. You know - the ones that it claims outnumber us 10 to 1? It makes vague references to the gut and the skin, which might very well be true, but it's certainly not true for us, overall.
When we actually have bacteria running arou
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I tend to trust science daily but they could be wrong
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A 10-second Google search [google.com] turns up the following quote at the top of a Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]: Bacterial cells are much smaller than human cells, and there are at least ten times as many bacteria as human cells in the body (approximately 10^14 versus 10^13).[6][7]
Because Wikipedia isn't a primary source, it's necessary to examine the peer-reviewed references to verify this claim:
The adult human organism is said to be composed of approximately 10^13 eukaryotic animal cells (27). That statement is only an expres
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The GI system is external to the human body, topologically speaking... they are not part of "us".
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>>Yeah, that's why I leave my large intestine at home if I don't plan on using it while I'm out.
Have you ever studied biology? Or evolution? The reason the GI tract and similar things are the way they are is because they are external to our bodies. You can, in fact, flush everything out of them without any harm, thus proving they are not part of our bodies.
Or if you prefer math, you can describe this topologically with your mouth open. In computer science terms, you can calculate the connected-spaces
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So, once again, you say you've just been making a point about topology this whole time? Let's see if that makes any sense...
This doesn't seem like a point about topology. It seems like you jumped from "90% of the cells in the human body are bacterial" to "90% of the mass of the human bo
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>>So, once again, you say you've just been making a point about topology this whole time? Let's see if that makes any sense...
I did. Read my other posts in this thread, you'll see I've been very careful to make this point every time.
>>You said this was a "modern urban legend that isn't even vaguely true".
Which I stand by. "We" are not made of bacteria, which is what the GP stated.
>>You just don't consider your large intestine to be part of your body, apparently.
Again, you have trouble wrap
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I just quoted all your posts in this thread to show that the people you were lecturing about biology weren't making claims about bacterial cells in blood or muscle, and neither is the scientific literature. That's just something you latched onto once your original point about dropping from "400 pounds down to 40" was shown to be based on an incorrect assumption.
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>>That's just something you latched onto once your original point about dropping from "400 pounds down to 40" was shown to be based on an incorrect assumption.
It's not an incorrect assumption. If our muscle cells were 90% bacteria running around in disguise, then we'd lose a significant portion of our weight when we took antibiotics.
The way the urban legend has mutated, though, to now say "We are 90% bacteria" which, again, isn't even remotely true. Search for that phrase to find the meme floating aro
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Sadly, I need to repeat that this would only be true if bacteria weren't thousands of times less massive than human cells. And that nobody you're talking to is talking about muscle cells.
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>>showing that only 10% of the cells in the human body
Flush your GI tract with some Fleet's and a antibiotic chaser. Are you still 90% bacteria? No.
So obviously "we" are not made of bacteria.
>>If I love to call you a dogmatist, then surely you can find at least one quote from me supporting that accusation?
"I try very hard not to be a dogmatist." -ShakaUVM
"I think you need to keep trying." -Khayman80
Care to print a retraction?
No?
Of course not.
>>libelous smears you've thrown at us
It's only l
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>>However, a professional physicist has no such excuse, which is why Jane's accusations (and your incessant accusations) that the overwhelming majority of the scientific community are lying and/or making ridiculously incompetent mistakes really are accusations that we're dishonest idiots.
Making mistakes is not the same as being a dishonest idiot.
Being biased is not the same as being a dishonest idiot.
Being a dogmatist is not the same as being a dishonest idiot.
>>If history is any guide, this is
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You're also not going to be able to properly digest food, and the population will recover within a few days. The fact that you can temporarily reduce the population of microflora in your large intestine doesn't mean that normal, healthy humans don't require the presence of these symbiotes to extract energy from food efficiently. That's why the ScienceDaily article says "h
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>>As I just said, you definitely have heard of her, because I mentioned her and you called her a nutcase.
Fair enough.
There's enough nuts on Slashdot that second-hand accounts of nutcasery don't stick in my memory. But there's really no reason to equate the two of us, as I rather think it silly to want to sue someone on Slashdot for something they said. It's about as silly as accusing them incorrectly of committing libel.
>>Notice that I was saying "I think you need to keep trying to understand my
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Your statements are false, and the baseless arguments you're repeating have done harm to the scientific community. I've documented these facts extensively. The third criterion seems redundant; making false statements means that by definition you made them without adequat
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>>Your statements are false, and the baseless arguments you're repeating have done harm to the scientific community. I've documented these facts extensively. The third criterion seems redundant; making false statements means that by definition you made them without adequate research into the truthfulness of your statements. I don't think that scientists count as celebrities, but even if they do, 'intent to do harm' seems to be supported by the hyperbolic insults and malicious language you've used to b
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lspci | grep -i radeon && exit 1
done.
Where's the letter? (Score:2)
All I see is an article talking about the letter, where's the actual letter?
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Starts on Page 2 [phoronix.com].
Novell, commited to open source (Score:3)
To ensure an open development process NOVELL would require that it will not make use of any specifications or programming documentation that can not be made available to other developers from the open source community also under a suitable documentation publication program which will permit the release of source code under an open source license.
This step will help to ensure continued maintenance for hardware components beyond the maintenance cycle of the manufacturer and will help customer to secure their investment. Furthermore it will demonstrate and underline AMD's full commitment to the open source development model and send a positive signal to the open source community which this has been waiting for for a long time.
NOVELL will ensure that a driver with at least base functionalities is available for earlier releases of the X Window System at least back to X11 R6.9 to be integrated in existing enterprise products by their respective vendors.
I thought the letter said this (Score:2)
That picture is looking sillier and sillier as time goes on.
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Yeah, I know! It's like how I saw this old newspaper a while back that called the Italians "fascists". What's up with that? It's like people and groups can change over time or something. Weird, you know?
And Italians still exist. ATI disappeared five years ago.
Open their specs (Score:2)
ATI has great quality hardware, but lower quality drivers/software. Nvidia it is the opposite.
I switched from Nvidia to ATI for this reason. My ATI 5750 does run Beryl suprising well. I game only on Windows 7 and I doubt performance would be good in Linux, but that can change. If ATI could get good quality drivers for Linux we would be happy to support them. The specs and code open are cryptic and only cover what appears to be a dispatcher which then transmit the code to the different parts of the GPU accor