

The letter that started AMD's Open-Source Strategy - riledhel
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_radeonhd_four&num=1

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zokier
I find the ATi/AMD FOSS driver story bit sad, considering the state of the
drivers today. I feel that the community kinda betrayed AMD there by not
managing to create high quality drivers even when given the docs they had
craved for so long. I remember the discussions on /. and elsewhere before
this; "Just give us the docs, and we'll write the drivers".

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MostAwesomeDude
Hi, I was one of the amateur community members that created drivers after the
AMD documentation drops started. Could you explain exactly what you feel is
not high-quality about the drivers we've written?

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wmf
Aren't the Linux drivers much later and much slower than AMD's Windows
drivers?

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MostAwesomeDude
The kernel part of the Linux drivers is written as soon as the developers get
hardware from AMD. There are currently a half-dozen AMD employees working on
this, as well as a few non-AMD people, and generally, hardware support has
been pretty concomitant with general releases of the hardware.

"Slower" really depends on what you're doing. If you're doing lots of 2D
stuff, then no, not by a long shot; the open drivers are generally very speedy
for 2D stuff. If you're doing 3D stuff, then the raw framerates might be
slower for games, but as a general rule, nobody's paid to make open drivers as
fast as possible, only fast enough to run well.

There's also a bit of disconnect between blessed AMD drivers and OEM drivers
for Windows; there's known hardware which has _never_ been supported by the
AMD Windows drivers but works fine in Linux under the open driver stack.
"Later" is kind of a loaded term; if you buy an AGP HD 2400 with a PCIe-to-AGP
bridge, it has immediate Windows support, from the OEM, but with no updates
and no upgrade path. Linux support lagged for that chipset by about four-six
months but continues today, with updates and fixes.

So, tl;dr: It varies so much that this question ends up being loaded.

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mariuolo
In other words: four years and they still suck.

