any impending news on video drivers for f12?

[Bill McGonigle]

On 08/15/2009 03:15 PM, drago01 wrote:
> File a bug against the xorg-x11-drv-ati and add information about
> which hardware you use and the output of xrandr, whether you use kms
> or not etc.
> Because setting the correct video mode  should work using the radeon
> driver, if not its a bug that should be fixed, but to fix it it has to
> be reported.

That's a necessary pre-condition for a solution, but he really raises
the more broad question about mainstream hardware support in Fedora.
Fedora isn't merely at the mercy of its upstreams, I know we have some
hard-working folks doing ATI support, but given the size of the
challenge, there is alot of hardware that's simply not supported or
doesn't work right.  There's a tongue-in-cheek saying that OSS is the
best software you can get for hardware that was made three years ago. ;)
 I'm running the radeonhd driver on my desktop because radeon can't get
resolutions right on my fairly pedestrian ATI card (yes, there's a bug
filed!).  But there are nearly 300 problems currently reported against
the radeon driver, about half as many on intel and about a third on
nouveau.  All told, a Fedora user might experience one of five hundred
different display failure modes using commonly available hardware, which
is an experience problem (the value of experience as a separate matter).

I understand some of the reasons - radeon and nouveau getting blown up
for rewrites, KMS, etc., but the net-result of my desktop is that video
is broken and sound is broken (the Pulse problems) - for lots of folks
Fedora works great as a server but the desktop is tricky and/or broken
to one degree or the other.  I live with it and try to help where I can,
but one couldn't imagine selling Fedora 11 as a boxed good at a software
store which is what some users want, and given the current state it
doesn't seem like Redhat Desktop will be much better in its next rev.

A while ago there was a linux PR effort saying "do you need a driver for
your hardware?  We'll write it for free.  Please, just tell us how."
About the same time ATI was saying it was opening all of its hardware
(why I chose one over nVidia).  If it were that straightforward, though,
there wouldn't be so much unsupported hardware, so I have to admit I
don't really understand this specific situation, but there is the larger
issue of things like abandoning the old Radeon driver  for the new in
the distro and perhaps an opportunity to review criteria for similar
future decisions.  It may be that Fedora just has to accept whatever
xorg decides to do, but it is complicated.

-Bill

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