General Procedure to get ATI/DRI card running?

Coleman Kane cokane at cokane.org
Wed Jul 2 10:07:51 EDT 2008


On Wed, 2008-07-02 at 09:38 -0400, Jarod Wilson wrote:
> 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.

That's great to hear. I haven't followed RH since FC3, so my comments
above about distro participation might be somewhat dated. I expect that
SuSE, who's leading the radeonhd work, also has some similar thing going
on.

X.org has been assembling "reference releases", but I have recently been
seeing the chatter about having a more active role from the X Consortium
in releases, to get the to happen more frequently.

> 
> > 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.

Yeah, same here. I gave up on most binary-only distributions because of
their being tied to software that was way out of date, and many of the
maintainers' reluctance to forward-port more frequently. I'm actually
tracking on the 1.6 development branch (xorg-server master from fd.o
git), and it runs pretty well.

In all, my platform consists of:
  * FreeBSD 8.0-CURRENT, sources as of two nights ago, with some local
patches 
    that I've got to have to get around the lack of a PCI MMIO remapper
in FreeBSD
    and that the HP BIOS writers overlap my AHCI and HD-Audio MMIO
regions (yay!)
  * The latest masters from the git repository for the packages that I
listed 
    earlier, from freedesktop.org
  * FireFox-3
  * All on amd64

Generally, with the exception of maybe once or twice every three months,
I have a perfectly stable reliable system, and can be sure that I can
safely update any number of those packages to get the latest features,
yet still keep stability. I submit requests weekly upstream to whatever
is giving me trouble, and it typically gets handled within about a week.
Those one or two times that I do get something that breaks my system, I
can recover from it given a couple of hours, back-track to an earlier
revision, and then proceed to keep working my day job (and then deal
with the thing that broke it all over the weekend).

For a completely free and open platform, that is really a minor set of
inconveniences to me... I find that I have a pretty comparable "serious
problem" rate as my "stable" WinXP system. I get a significantly better
experience as a software development box out of my FreeBSD and Linux
machines though.

-- 
Coleman Kane



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