The ati petition

[Hamie]

Alan Cox wrote:

>On Gwe, 2004-09-03 at 16:23, Gene Heskett wrote:
>  
>
>>The machine?  AMD 2800XP.  Biostar M7-NCD-Pro Motherboard.  A gig of 
>>DDR333 dual channel ram, and an Extacy 9200SE 128 meg card.  I 
>>certainly ought to be able to run tuxracer.
>>    
>>
>
>9200 3D works in CVS Xorg. 
>
>Their 2D in CVS works up to the very latest PCI Express hardware - which
>I think counts as pretty damned good support.
>
>  
>
I'm not sure what the PCI Express hardware is sorry. But anything r3xx 
based (Radeon 9600, 9800 etc) doesn't have squat as far as acceleration 
goes AFAIK (I'd be grateful... extreemly grateful... If I was wrong... 
But unfortunatley, I don't think I am). AT least in open source... And 
that's the main problem.

ATI probably THINK they're doing a good job with supporting Unix users 
and their fglrx closed source drivers. And for SOME users (OK. The 
majority) it probably works quite well. That's desktop people who don't 
use ACPI for power management, and who never need to suspend their 
machines etc..

Unfortunatly they have IMO missed the point... There is more than one 
windowing system (i.e. XOrg & XFree) and although their drivers probably 
work (Where they do work) in both systems at the moment, they may not 
tomorrow... Plus they work in a manner where the ATI developers decree 
they should work. It's hard to belive they even recognise that the 
drivers are actually used on laptops for example. Purely because on a 
laptop they are not the best shall we say at recovering from 
suspending... They also don't work with frame buffers... And I like 
200x75 text mode...

if ATI would just release the programming information there'd be any 
number of people willing to write GOOD and STABLE drivers that would 
work for ALL situations... And if they didn't work, someone (Besides the 
original author, who may not even know we have a problem after all) 
could fix them. Because all the information would be there...

Their model may work in Windoze, but even there the VENDOR usually does 
the drivers... At least as far as IBM laptops go... ATI probably never 
even deal with laptops in the windoze world. And thus would lack the 
experience required to truely appreciate what's required.

Of course if I'm wrong I'm sorry.... I wish I was & that the ATI drivers 
were the best in the world (Because after all I have a laptop with an 
M10/rv350 in it). But unless ATI release the INFORMATION for CURRENT 
chipsets (Heck the 3xx isn't even state of the art any more, thats the 
4xx isn't it?) taht's never going to happen.

H