General Procedure to get ATI/DRI card running?

[Jarod Wilson]

On Wed, 2008-07-02 at 09:12 -0400, Coleman Kane wrote:
> It is really important to understand, though, that the X.org project
> is
> really one without a "home" or "owner". The X Consortium (x.org)
> really
> only committed to provide some hosting, and maintain a central
> repository of protocol, format, and other project-related standards
> and
> specifications. Through its history as X.org and XFree86, it has never
> gotten significant support from the hardware vendors that it is
> expected
> to support. Support for 3Dfx hardware, for instance, didn't really get
> solid until after 3Dfx shut its doors and released all their docs
> on-line for free. When all the packages went modular, it was supposed
> to
> nudge the bigger distributors (RedHat, SuSE/Novell, Debian, etc...) to
> maintain their own X.org-derived distributions of X.org software, and
> perform stability testing on the feature snapshots and release their
> own
> distributions as development went on on the various freedesktop.org
> projects. Basically, to take a more active role in testing and
> reporting
> X.org problems.

Nb: there's now an upstream xorg release manager (Adam Jackson), who
also happens to be the X lead here at Red Hat.

> To this day, that hasn't happened except in the case of the OpenBSD
> project. Now everyone suffers because graphics hardware is getting
> close
> to having a shorter lifespan than X.org releases. The X.org
> consortium,
> to its credit, has finally recognized this and recently announced it
> is
> going to change its release schedule to be more aggressive. The likely
> result of this is a much quick time-to-market for new features, at the
> expense of an increase in bugs exposed to the public (and hopefully,
> found quicker and fixed quicker).
> 
> Today graphics hardware provides all sorts of features not considered
> by
> the developers when X.org 1.3 or 1.4 were released. The development
> trees are where all this stuff is being developed (EXA, DRI2, next-gen
> RandR code, new DRM). They've done a heck of a lot of overhaul in the
> Mesa and Xserver source code trees in the past couple months. The best
> I
> can say is that, following the lists myself and the chats, they are
> working really hard at getting this stuff together. You should
> probably
> see 1.5 released with a lot of this new feature-set around August. If
> you want to improve the odds of this happening, you should get
> involved.
> 
> I would, at the very least, recommend you try forwarding your email to
> the developers list at X.org and also your Linux distribution. Both
> are
> culpable in the problems that you are experiencing.

My distribution of choice is already shipping a 1.5 pre-release with all
these goodies. :)

Funnily enough though, Fedora 9 actually got a lot of flak for shipping
with the 1.5 pre-release code, mostly since the binary nvidia driver was
broken at release time... Overall though, its definitely been worth it,
particularly the new randr stuff for my own usage.


-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com