Valve begins publicly listing AMD catalyst driver bugs in Linux

[Kingofpants]

AMD should really just make their drivers Completely open source so people improve them themselves.

If the were open source right now I would remove the stupid Monitor snapping code they added in.

Who the hell wants to snap their monitor to very specific places.

I want it calibrated properly.

[Liam-McShane]

i understand your point. But in that case AMD should not claim Linux support/compatibility. They should Either abandon it or support it properly. E.g. A game dev who ports their game to a new platform is expected to do a proper job and deliver a Fully working product as advertised, anything less is unethical and gets rightly criticised in the gaming press. If they think it's not lucrative they should not be on that platform, that's their choice of course. But if they commit then customers expect them to do a proper job.

That's a fair point which I cannot really argue with without repeating myself. Two different ways of going about things. Full support or base your resources on market share. AMD has chosen the latter.

[monstercameron]

Yes you are missing a great deal.

 

 

 

Linus didn't give Nvidia the finger because their drivers are bad. He gave them the finger because they are control freaks over their drivers and didn't want to support Optimus on GNU/Linux.

Performance is good and their drivers work well. They are just dicks to work with.

not quite, linus was just upset due to the fact that nvidia uses a lot of linux yet they dont contribute back.

[monstercameron]

AMD should really just make their drivers Completely open source so people improve them themselves.

If the were open source right now I would remove the stupid Monitor snapping code they added in.

Who the hell wants to snap their monitor to very specific places.

I want it calibrated properly.

lol if gpu driver programming was so easy, there wouldnt be so many issues would there?

besides the amd r600 and radeonsi drivers are fully opensource and specs freely available to write drivers for.

[Kingofpants]

lol if gpu driver programming was so easy, there wouldnt be so many issues would there?

besides the amd r600 and radeonsi drivers are fully opensource and specs freely available to write drivers for.

I know its not easy, of course its not easy. But it porably is easy to find the bit that snaps the monitor to the nearest place, and remove it or change it.

At least if code is De-obfuscated and easy to read.

That might not be the case though.

[LAwLz]

i understand your point. But in that case AMD should not claim Linux support/compatibility. They should Either abandon it or support it properly. E.g. A game dev who ports their game to a new platform is expected to do a proper job and deliver a Fully working product as advertised, anything less is unethical and gets rightly criticised in the gaming press. If they think it's not lucrative they should not be on that platform, that's their choice of course. But if they commit then customers expect them to do a proper job.

Well some support is better than no support. I think the best would be to release the drivers as open source.

Hell, I don't really get why this isn't standard for both Nvidia and AMD on all platforms. They make their money from the hardware anyway. I could get not wanting to open source for example the recording feature but at least release the rest.

[Humbug]

I think the best would be to release the drivers as open source.

there are apparently aspects of the driver which AMD does not want nvidia to see as it would give away some secrets. Same with nvidia's driver.

[patrickjp93]

My point still stands. Linux market share is so slim at the minute that quite frankly AMD would be wasting resources improving their drivers for it.

HAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh you are such a laugh. look at the server world. It's 90% Linux and FreeBSD, both based on Unix. AMD would be fools to NOT improve drivers.

[Humbug]

HAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh you are such a laugh. look at the server world. It's 90% Linux and FreeBSD, both based on Unix. AMD would be fools to NOT improve drivers.

i don't think GPU driver performance is an issue in the server world. This is a gaming/desktop concern.

[monstercameron]

HAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh you are such a laugh. look at the server world. It's 90% Linux and FreeBSD, both based on Unix. AMD would be fools to NOT improve drivers.

flgrx drivers doesnt matter much in the server realm. That's what firepro is for.

[patrickjp93]

flgrx drivers doesnt matter much in the server realm. That's what firepro is for.

FirePro's drivers aren't much better. Apple rolls their own for the Mac Pro.

[patrickjp93]

i don't think GPU driver performance is an issue in the server world. This is a gaming/desktop concern.

Says one who has never done massively parallel scientific computing.

[MEC-777]

so their drivers do suck. explains why catalyst screwed up so badly on a linux mint dual boot. oh well i ended up removing that OS anyway.

Their Linux drivers suck, yes. However, their Windows drivers are just fine. Just wanted to clear that up.

[rockking1379]

Their Linux drivers suck, yes. However, their Windows drivers are just fine. Just wanted to clear that up.

i recently switched off AMD over to NVIDIA.

[monstercameron]

FirePro's drivers aren't much better. Apple rolls their own for the Mac Pro.

apple doesnt make drivers for the mac pro's amd gpus. Also firepro drivers are validated differently from catalyst/fglrx

[patrickjp93]

apple doesnt make drivers for the mac pro's amd gpus. Also firepro drivers are validated differently from catalyst/fglrx

You willing to bet? I've worked with FirePros both in academic machines carrying Fedora and MacOS. Some very skilled people make drivers for normal AMD GPUs, but there are some open source FirePro drivers for Linux. Apple rolls their own. You can use SSH or another program to port the files to a server and use obj dump to view them. FirePro drivers get an update from Apple directly on the Mac Pro platform.

[monstercameron]

You willing to bet? I've worked with FirePros both in academic machines carrying Fedora and MacOS. Some very skilled people make drivers for normal AMD GPUs, but there are some open source FirePro drivers for Linux. Apple rolls their own. You can use SSH or another program to port the files to a server and use obj dump to view them. FirePro drivers get an update from Apple directly on the Mac Pro platform.

apple doesnt make amd firepro drivers.

[ionbasa]

apple doesnt make amd firepro drivers.

Well, yes, and no. Since OSX is technically based on BSD, which is Unix, Apple does port drivers for the GPUs used in their computers. As far as I know there are no official Unix drivers released my AMD. 

[Tonylu1595]

Well good for Nvidia for keeping performance up.

[Misanthrope]

Surprising considering Linux is a free to all thing, and AMD seems to be similar, I thought those two would be gay for each other (no offense meant to gays)

AMD talks big on being open source but actually they aren't much better than Nvidia, just ask LAwLz for more on that

[Trik'Stari]

AAMD talks big on being open source but actually they aren't much better than Nvidia, just ask LAwLz for more on that

I will trust your judgment. LAwLz #rekt me earlier on something so I wont bother him/her with it lol

[Rhys R]

HAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh you are such a laugh. look at the server world. It's 90% Linux and FreeBSD, both based on Unix. AMD would be fools to NOT improve drivers.

Linux only holds a measly 1.67% percent of the desktop market share. How often are you really going to see a server running a GPU? UNIX-Like operating systems don't even hold 90% of the server market either; the estimated amount of windows servers was about 32%.

[mr moose]

HAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh you are such a laugh. look at the server world. It's 90% Linux and FreeBSD, both based on Unix. AMD would be fools to NOT improve drivers.

 

Linux is used in 90% of web servers (graphics drivers are irrelevant there,  for corporate machines (also irrelevant for GPU drivers) its almost 1/3rds now, 1/3 Linux, 1/3 Unix and 1/3 windows.  For desktop Linux has 1.6% while windows has 90% and Unix/OSX is 7%.

 

There is honestly very little drive for AMD to put effort into Linux drivers, maybe if steam becomes a more sure of a thing, but not right now.

[patrickjp93]

Linux only holds a measly 1.67% percent of the desktop market share. How often are you really going to see a server running a GPU? UNIX-Like operating systems don't even hold 90% of the server market either; the estimated amount of windows servers was about 32%.

Have you ever heard of GPU acceleration/GPGPU computing? Almost every server now has a heterogeneous compute GPU such as an Nvidia Tesla or AMD Firepro. Although, now Intel's Xeon Phi are the compute kings. I'm not talking small fry in-home media servers.

Windows Server is used by Microsoft and home media servers, the latter of which is not really part of what's referred to as part of the server/supercomputer market.

[patrickjp93]

Linux is used in 90% of web servers (graphics drivers are irrelevant there, for corporate machines (also irrelevant for GPU drivers) its almost 1/3rds now, 1/3 Linux, 1/3 Unix and 1/3 windows. For desktop Linux has 1.6% while windows has 90% and Unix/OSX is 7%.

There is honestly very little drive for AMD to put effort into Linux drivers, maybe if steam becomes a more sure of a thing, but not right now.

Forgive me, but you clearly don't get it. Big media/game servers use GPU's to compress/decompress lots and lots of data on its way in and out of a system. In the corporate world, where SQL is ubiquitous, exactly how do you think the back-end implementations of the search algorithms are implemented? If you're not GPU-accelerated at this point, you're not competitive.