On Fri, July 3, 2009 20:30, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: > Well, AMD uses a fixed cycle - one release a month. They also have a > fixed development cycle that takes roughly 3 month (all explained on > phoronix a long time ago). So supporting the latest kernels is not easy or > even possible.
Very well for them, I don't know how that is relevant, since 2.6.29 was released 23-Mar-2009 23:30. So, by now, both the 1 month and the 3 month cycles have passed. Still no support. Or maybe my maths are not correct. > They also only support a few distros. If you insist on using a > non-supported kernel, you are on your own. Crap. All the distros use the same kernel. If it compiles against a vanilla kernel, it will compile against a vanilla kernel on *every* distro under the sun. There can be problems with the location of the libraries, versions of xorg and mesa and the like, that that's out of the scope of this thread, which is basically that we will get a working driver for 2.6.30 6 months after the kernel is released. By then we will have .35, which won't work with fglrx either. That the distro is listed as supported or not doesn't change the scenery if you want to use a current kernel for some reason. > That said - Nvidia might be 'better' when it comes to binary drivers, but > they suck when it comes to open source drivers. Agreed. But at least, you have *one* driver that works. With my hd2600, fglrx sucks big time, and neither radeon nor radeonhd works (unless I disable dri, and then vesa performs better). If I have to choose between one closed driver that works perfectly and one close driver that works bad+2 open ones that simply don't work, I choose the closed driver that works. > AMD is working on free > drivers for all cards - that is something you have to recognize. As far as I know (I might be wrong) amd isn't working in anything. They just released the specifications and some technical sheets. The community is doing all the work. > Besides - if you use the ebuild, even 2.6.30 works. Yes, dmesg is spammed > with ugly messages. But who cares? Do you really monitor dmesg non stop? Who cares?!? mmmm, my /var partition gets filled with +1gb logs everyday, I have to delete the logs (yes, losing everything in them) and then restart the sys logger because while the files are open the space won't be freed. The driver does that, and the rest of my programs fail. But, who cares... The cpu usage is insane when using fglrx on .30, 60-100% on X when I play something in mplayer, so while watching a movie I can't do anything else, with the same fglrx version on linux 2.6.28 it takes around 10%. Who cares? I do. The driver just doesn't work, these are not minor annoyances, as you paint them, these are big problems. And the ebuild should be eliminated, and the old one depending on <2.6.29 should be restored. I really advice to stay in .28 if you are going to use fglrx. -- Jesús Guerrero
