support for latest (radeon) hardware

Thorsten Leemhuis fedora at leemhuis.info
Sat Jan 24 17:34:08 UTC 2009


On 24.01.2009 16:14, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 13:20:09 +0100,
>   Thorsten Leemhuis <fedora at leemhuis.info> wrote:
>> I compared radeon.xinf from 6.9 and 6.10 and found a few important cards  
>> that 6.10 supports, but 6.9 does not:
> 
>> * configure xorg-x11-drv-radeonhd to get their hardware running
>> * switch to rawhide to get it running
>> * rebuild the srpm from rawhide to get it running.
>> * switch to another distro that has more up2date drivers
>> * wait till F11 comes out
>>
>> But those options are all bad IMHO. Especially the option "wait till F11  
>> comes out", because letting users out in the cold without drivers for up  
>> multiple month sounds stupid to me when those drivers exist already --  
>> especially as new graphic card series come out every 6 to 12 months,  
>> which means we'll run into the same problem quite soon again.
> The current 6.10 driver in rawhide does not work with my rv280 based card.
> The Xorg.0.log file suggests that it is a problem with AGP support.

Well, that needs to be fixed then sooner or later anyway. But that's a 
different topic.

> The drivers in F11 are tied to the kernels there more than in the past
> because of modesetting support, so there is likely more work in getting
> 6.10 to work in F10 than there would have been doing something similar
> in the past.

You have a point, nevertheless I don't think that point is that 
important as modesetting for radeon is in both F10 and rawhide. Further: 
2.6.28 (which was in rawhide until a few weeks ago) will soon be in F10, 
2.6.29 (which is in rawhide) will likely sooner or later get into F10. 
So that relation needs constant maintenance work already in any case.

> There is a lot going on right now in the driver world, so expect things to
> be slow for a while. ATI released a bunch of specs. Kernel modesetting is
> being turned on. Having the kernel manage the video memory is being turned
> on (and changed at the same time for ATI chips). And Dave Airlie has a new born.

(As a lot of people will know) I'm well aware of all of that ;-) (BTW: 
congrats for your little girl Dave!).

But it's not like I requested a update to 6.10 immediately. It's just 
that the mail I replied to sounded a bit like "6.10 for F10 is unlikely 
in general". That's *IMHO* bad. Mainly for two reasons:

* regular users will go and install the fglrx drivers, as those offer 
support for the 4xxxx series; that is something most of us don't want 
users to do, hence we should offer them a better solution

* Fedora in most areas is good for new hardware, as you get new drivers 
(hplip, gutenprint, sane,...) and even new kernels as regular update, 
which improves hardware support (especially for current hardware) over 
time. But Fedora not only would be "good for new hardware", it could 
have "fantastic support for new hardware" if support for other new 
hardware (like the big bunch of the Radeon HD 4xxx series) also could 
find it's way into the stable distro.

 > [...]

Cu
knurd




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