News ATI drivers

[pcpa at mandriva.com.br]

Quoting Otto Solares <solca at guug.org>:

(Replying again, webmail was not adding .br to email address and first replay
was rejected)

> On Thu, Sep 13, 2007 at 12:17:01PM -0700, David Bronaugh wrote:
>> Perhaps you should enlist someone's help to solve the configuration
>> issues, instead of accusing the devels of broken drivers.
>
> Apart from configuration issues the R200 driver performs ~ 1/4 as the
> Windows driver, the driver is extremely high quality, maybe is just
> missing something, probably by lack of full specs or lack of interest
> or lack of devel manpower, this is just a hint to all great driver
> devels and to AMD that R100/200/300 hardware is still important for us.
>
> Thanks!
>
> -otto

Several years ago, when I worked on xf86cfg (and used to work full time on X
for Conectiva for some time), I did a scratch of what could become a tool for
quality control and possibly "driver certification" builtin in xf86cfg. I
believe that code doesn't even compile anymore.
My idea was to have driver options documentation in the source code, from
where it could be extracted during the build for extra documentation (the
Options file is severily outdated, but was a start...). I believe that 
code can
be extracted from the now xorgcfg, to a separate tool, that would load the
driver, wrap most of the X server calls etc, this to make sure the driver is
sane. And also hopefuly offer more options to the developer.
There are already OpenGL and "generic" tools to test conformance (the "xtest
suite" among others). Maybe this can be reworked again. Well, I did that
without any plan, just started coding. This could be an interesting 
project, to
hopefully create a testing/certification system that would give a better
experience to the "end user", and (cross fingers :-) guarantee an
stable/reliable X, because developers would notice problems before
releases/etc.
What does people think? Suggestions, comments?

Paulo