On Fri, 15 Jun 2007, Ali Mashtizadeh wrote:
Hi,
Sun's pushing ATI/AMD to provide good drivers for Solaris, so it means they
will have to work on the portability issue of their drivers. It is probably
the best time to influence AMD's decision since they are going to do what
Sun tells them. Nvidia has an easier time porting their drivers since the
core of the driver is the same across all platforms AFAIK. Hopefully, they
will realize the best stratedgy is to open source their drivers, which there
has been some hints about it recently.
--
Ali Mashtizadeh
علی مشتی زاده
On 6/15/07, Jeremy Chadwick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Fri, Jun 15, 2007 at 02:03:39PM -0400, Ali Mashtizadeh wrote:
> Hey everyone,
>
> This email went out on Xorg I thought it might be useful for all of us
stuck
> with ATI cards. We should all show our interest in AMD helping out the
BSD
> community as well! Just like Nvidia has been doing!
"Linux strategy" -- gotta love the use of the word "strategy", like
they're playing chess or Risk or Daisenryaku. Yes, because supporting
an operating system involves "strategy".
Not to sound rude, but I wouldn't hold your breath over the statement.
Yes, *absolutely* mail them and show support for the BSDs, and tell them
you'll be happy to beta test whatever they put out (as long as they have
a good feedback method for reporting those bugs; not some defunct HTML
form web page that sends submissions to /dev/null).
I believe AMD/ATI cares about providing a good driver base (for Linux
and probably the BSDs), but no matter how many customers mail them, the
reality of the situation is a disappointing one: managers and executives
of sorts are who have say over all of this, who decide all of this, and
who ultimately make the statements on all of this. As a Texan co-worker
of mine says, "too many chiefs, not enough indians". nVidia has the
same "problem", for what it's worth.
--
| Jeremy Chadwick jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB |
1. This shouldn't have been sent to the hackers@ list, because it's more of a
discussion than a technical topic.
2. Please top post.
Disregarding those 2 comments, I have a few thoughts:
1. It doesn't matter which company you deal with, ATI/AMD, Intel, nVidia -- all
are large corporations and swaying the interest of the execs and legal depts to
release corporate secrets and technologies is a big deal because it's their
competitive edges in the marketplace.
2. Intel did opensourced their graphics drivers, and of course there's been a
great deal of followup discussion about nVidia and ATI doing the same thing,
but like Jeremy said I have little faith in the companies opensourcing their
drivers for at least 1-2 years because their secrets are their livelihood and
they don't want competitors having access to them.
3. The ATI Linux drivers quite frankly suck right now. They're currently at the
stage that nVidia was 3-4 years ago with Linux (working, but not on all
distros, quite a few hacks in place), and I wasn't impressed in the least by
them (hence I dumped my ATI card and purchased an nVidia one).
4. Sun is a lot different than Linux or FreeBSD. Sun is a software/hardware
vendor with plenty of financial collateral behind them, so their getting
support faster than FreeBSD is more likely, as long as the devs are there to
support Solaris.
5. I did email ATI about support and apparently I sent my message to the wrong
section (I should have requested a driver enhancement, not filed bug -- I hate
some online forms and their lack of clarity). But since I purchased my nVidia
card after the fact I never followed up on the reply I got from ATI. I highly
doubt your message gets shuffled away into nowhere; it would create a bad
corporate image to ignore current/potential customers ;).
Cheers,
-Garrett
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