Fwd: Request to update ATi OSS driver for Fedora 12

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2009-10-22 at 19:56 +0800, Liang Suilong wrote:
> To Adam Williamson
> 
> I try to add kernel parameter nomodeset to turn off KMS. After logging
> in Gnome and run gnome-terminal, I can scroll up and down my mouse so
> smoothly. I do not feel scrolling in the terminal is slow. 

Thanks for testing. See my reply to Michal for the next steps: I'm
checking with Jerome Glisse whether it's necessary for you to file a bug
report in this case.

> We can sure that KMS for R600 cause the problem. But KMS in the
> mainline kernel is experimental. I believe that the bug will be fixed.
> Thanks to Fedora developers, I can enjoy compiz with  opensource
> drivers. 

Yes, this is something the developers are working on for sure.

> Another things, xorg-x11-drv-ati with mesa-dri-drivers-experimental
> seems not to ru gnome-shell. Does it mean that ATi opensource need
> more OpenGL extensions to stand for gnome-shell?

Well, on my test system it runs, but doesn't really work: there's a
known bug which stops any input to gnome-shell working (so basically you
can't _do_ anything with it, trying to click on any gnome-shell element
doesn't work). As I said, this is a known bug in the Mesa stuff which
should get fixed at some point. I imagine any other problem you're
seeing with gnome-shell is similar in nature. As mentioned, this code is
known to be pretty alpha :)

> Plymouth is so beautiful and smooth when I start up my Fedora 12,
> nevertheless, it does not work when I shutdown or reboot my box. I
> just can see a black screen or console status. How can I make plymouth
> run again?

This could be related to disabling KMS, I suppose, but I don't know any
more than that I'm afraid.

> ATi should learn Intel how to develop opensource drivers for their
> graphic card. The relationship between ati and radeonhd should be
> cooperation not competition. This is just my opinon. 

That's not quite the situation. The 'ati' driver is not written entirely
by ATI/AMD, it is a proper communally-developed driver to which our Red
Hat staff and others contribute significantly, based on information and
specifications provided by ATI/AMD.

'radeonhd' is essentially a competing driver. The history is that the
radeonhd driver came out before the ati/radeon driver (technically the
driver in question is called 'radeon', the "driver" called 'ati' is
really just a wrapper which loads either 'radeon', 'r128' or 'mach64'
depending on the hardware that's detected) gained any support for r500+
chips at all. (Actually, a driver called 'avivo' came before either of
those, but never mind that). After a while, the 'radeon' driver added
support for r500+ chips, so there are now two different open source
drivers, both officially part of the X.org project, which support r500+
devices. 'radeonhd' is supported by Novell and gets contributions from
Novell's paid developers, 'radeon' is more supported by Red Hat.

Obviously this isn't sustainable and eventually the two will merge
somehow, but for now there's two drivers, and Fedora supports 'radeon'.
'radeonhd' is really only available from the Fedora repositories for
research purposes.

The fact that there are two open source drivers is not the fault of
ATI/AMD in any way, they shouldn't take any blame for it. They have in
fact been moving in a very good direction lately, and their relationship
with the X development community is pretty much as good as Intel's now.
Neither 'radeon' nor 'radeonhd' would have developed to the point they
have without the help and support of ATI/AMD.

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net