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ATI Releases AIGLX Linux Driver

Posted by kdawson on Tue Oct 23, 2007 03:13 PM
from the making-compiz-sing-and-dance dept.
Graphics Software Linux
Michael writes "A month after AMD released a Radeon HD 2000 'R600' Linux driver based on their new Linux driver codebase, they have now released another driver that provides AIGLX support used for Compiz and Compiz Fusion. In addition to this long-awaited AIGLX support, this driver also addresses issues with previous Radeon product families, performance improvements, AGP fixes, and added features to their graphical control panel. Phoronix has a review of the 8.42 Linux driver with all of the details about this much-anticipated release."
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[+] AMD Launches New ATI Linux Driver 262 comments
Michael Larabel writes "AMD has issued a press release announcing 'significant graphics performance and compatibility enhancements' on Linux. AMD will be delivering new ATI Linux drivers this year that offer ATI Radeon HD 2000 series support, AIGLX support (Beryl and Compiz), and major performance improvements. At Phoronix we have been testing these new drivers internally for the past few weeks and have a number of articles looking at this new driver. The ATI 8.41 Linux driver delivers Linux gaming improvements from the R300/400 series and the R500 series. The inaugural Radeon HD 2900XT series support also can be found in the new ATI Linux driver with 'the best price/performance ratio of any high-end graphics card under Linux.' While this new driver cannot be downloaded yet, in their press release AMD also alludes to accelerating efforts with the open-source community."
Submission: ATI Releases AIGLX Linux Driver by Anonymous Coward
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ATI Releases AIGLX Linux Driver 50 Comments More /

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  • So.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 23 2007, @03:16PM (#21090621)
    ..will it run on Linux? Seriously...

    • Re:So.. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Kozar_The_Malignant (738483) on Tuesday October 23 2007, @03:41PM (#21091005)

      ..will it run on Linux? Seriously...

      From TFA: "but there are a few words of caution. Be forewarned that there is a bug in Compiz 0.3 affecting the fglrx 8.42.3 driver and there may be a few other situations where Compiz or Compiz Fusion may not work immediately. The bug found in Compiz 0.3 and that's causing havoc with fglrx 8.42.3, has been resolved in Compiz 0.6. Next month in fglrx 8.43, AMD will be introducing a workaround for Compiz 0.3 support. "

      So that's a definite "Maybe".

  • Well it will be nice to get my cheap ATI card out of vga mode at 640x480 at 4bit color.... Maybe one day I can move up to 8 bit color.
    • Well, my cheap ATI card runs at 1024x768 at 32-bit color with full 3d acceleration

      (Note: Mobility Radeon 9100, R200)
      • I have an ATI ES1000 (Dell SC440) that is supposed to have 2D acceleration, including xvideo. The driver reports working xvideo, but actually playing a video (on xine, mplayer, or totem) gives a blue screen where the video should be. (And the same software on older 2D only ATI cards works fine).
        • The open-source ATI driver (the one that's been around a while, not the new one AMD's starting) is nearly perfect with R200 (Radeon 8500/9100m) cards

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by stinerman (812158)
            Yes, it's quite good and is especially needed as fglrx doesn't support R200 chips anymore.

            The bad thing for us R3xx owners is now that all the specs are open for R5xx and R6xx, I don't think there will be much more work on the older cards. I wouldn't want to do a bunch of reverse engineering for an old card when I could get docs for the new ones.
              • The R2xx (8500, 9200) chips had documentation available under NDA. The R3xx, R4xx chips (9500, 9600, 9800) are purely reverse engineered.

  • Bullshit... (Score:5, Informative)

    by MostAwesomeDude (980382) on Tuesday October 23 2007, @03:33PM (#21090889) Homepage
    ...at least in my experience.

    Problem one: Doesn't actually work with Compiz. While AIGLX works, XComposite does not, and loading Compiz results in massive screen corruption. Joy.

    Problem two: Anybody who had XVideo problems before, will probably still have them now. Sad but true. Ditto with font selection and rendering.

    Problem three: While X.org server 1.4 is supported, Linux 2.6.23 is not. Anybody running on the bleeding edge is once again locked out.

    I'm sure more bugs will show up, but I'm pretty disappointed that they haven't improved the heavily broken XComposite support that they claim "works just fine."

    • Re:Bullshit... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by FMZ (1178473) <kj_sonny@hotm a i l . c om> on Tuesday October 23 2007, @03:37PM (#21090957)

      Problem three: While X.org server 1.4 is supported, Linux 2.6.23 is not. Anybody running on the bleeding edge is once again locked out.
      Umm... there's a reason they call it the "bleeding edge". Sometimes it hurts.

    • Re:Bullshit... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DeadManCoding (961283) on Tuesday October 23 2007, @03:38PM (#21090977)
      While the system may still be broken, it doesn't matter. The Linux community (myself included) has wanted better open source drivers for video cards, and AMD is finally making good on it. I may not be able to play bleeding edge games on my Linux system, but the software is getting there, and that's the important part.

        • Separate stuff. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by DrYak (748999) on Tuesday October 23 2007, @06:00PM (#21092857) Homepage
          TFA is about the current closed source ATI drivers, (the one downloadable from AMD's website).

          The GP was speaking about the opensource drivers, which is a different project [livejournal.com]. Anyway, AMD/ATI has promised to help them too, and is currently in the process of releasing specs, step by step. Currently they have provided enough information for the mode setting :
          - it's now possible to switch to a 2D mode using opensource drivers. Before that, VESA was the only working solution because of important change between the Radeon 2D architecture (up to R4x0 / Radeon X850) and the Avivo 2D architecture (from R5x0 Radeon X1x00 onward).

          Other specs will follow step by step. Anyway, you'll still have to wait at least 1 year befor good and stable opensource drivers for Radeon HD 2900 start to popup in your favorite Linux/BSD distro. The good news from today's article is that until then the current closed source drivers are ratter good.
          And AMD is promising to keep releasing specs for the opensource drivers project.
          • And apparently neither you nor the original responder use said drivers. The latest showing up on their site as of 9:31 EST is 8.40.1, not the driver this article purports to cover. Which is what I was why I was asking where the driver was.

            This makes four pages on how it almost works not worth much. Also, performance gains through increasing the artifact count don't do much for me.. although I'd be able to say for sure if I could get the driver.

            At any rate, you can check for yourself right here: http://at [amd.com]

            • The different versions and URLs (Score:4, Informative)

              by DrYak (748999) on Wednesday October 24 2007, @05:19AM (#21097427) Homepage
              • 8.42 : is currently *being* released, links are not updated everywhere. But a few google request may bring you to forums where it is already available [fuckinggoogleit.com]. For exemple, Phoroinix [phoronix.com] have published a link to the driver they did test. I think the release is not official yet because of the reported problems with 2.6.23 kernel. The same google search can also bring out patches to circumvent those problems [phoronix.com] and even howtos about using the new AIGLX [ubuntuforums.org] for desktop compositing.
              • 8.41 : Is the previous release. It was mainly centered around bringing RadeonHD support on linux. Thus some bugs may have managed to slip by with older chipsets. IT IS available on the ATI [amd.com] website. But it comes with a caveat [amd.com] explaining the situation, that this driver is mainly targeting Radeon HD and that it's "use at your own risk" with previous chipset generations. You're still free to try it on X800XL if you want (Phoroinix [phoronix.com] did it in their).
              • 8.40 : is the latest release using the older code base. Currently it is what has been the most widely tested and debugged for older chipset, so that's why it's the first thing you land on.
              • There's a nice wiki [cchtml.com] about ATI on Linux, with distro specific pages, links to the latest bleeding edge versions and such.


              GPL drivers are currently standard on most distribution for cards up to R4#0 (Radeon X8#0). If you want bleeding edge you can get them from freedesktop's git repository.
              GPL drivers for R500 and up are currently being created. You can get the currently couple of working pieces from its corresponding irregular devel companion [livejournal.com].

              You either have to wait more time until it's trivially offered as the first choice on the ATI selector (for the binary drivers) out of the box with major distros (for the GPL driver).
              Or you have to accept "bleeding edge" mean, understand that all those drivers are fresh from the oven, not thoroughly tested thus maybe not ready for the public at large, and that you need a little bit of google before assembling the necessary pieces, or use specialised resources like the afore mentioned wiki.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by AmaDaden (794446)
      Keep in mind how new this is and how complex a GPU is these days. It's gonna be a mess for a few sometime. What I would like to know is who is more dedicated to making Linux drivers that are (eventually) rock solid? I'm planing to build a new rig soon. Should I go nVidiea because I know they have decent drivers now or ATI because once they get the kinks out it'll be better? I'm sure people are gonna say that ATI is better because they went Open Source. But nVidiea could open up any day now in response to al
      • I've just gone with Nvidia. My reasoning was along the lines of I need to use the system now. If/when ATI/AMD get enough specs out and everything is coded correctly, I can ebay/craigslist the nVidia and switch to ATI. I'm not holding my breath, as someone else said GPU's are complex, it'll take time for it to stabilize (and yes I'd prefer the open source version as well but I'm not willing to work with an unstable/minimally functionally system either)

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Spy Hunter (317220)
        ATI committed to providing complete documentation, but did not provide the source code to their current driver. This is (partially) because their current closed driver contains proprietary IP that ATI does not own, so they can't open-source it. NVIDIA is in the same situation and will have to take the same slow route to open-source drivers when they eventually come to their senses. They cannot "open up any day now" and "have a working code base" instantly, any more than ATI could.
        • last I checked all that had been released were 2D specs which aren't worth much given that we already have an opensource 2D driver.

          If ati releases usable opensource 3D drivers or even closed source ones that are better than nvidia maybe I will consider switching but not until then.

    • Did you install xserver-xgl?

      That worked wonders for my Radeon XPRESS 200M on my 7.04->7.10 Ubuntu install
  • "The Linux 2.6.23 support isn't found in fglrx 8.42.3 due to issues with x86_64 support. However, we do expect that fglrx 8.43 will contain the Linux 2.6.23 kernel support."

    Skilled folks, those ATI engineers..
    • So, because there were issues with x64 on 2.6.23, everyone with 2.6.23 has to suffer? How hard would it have been to leave in 2.6.23 support with the caveat that it won't work on x64?
  • I'm having problems with Nvidia and ATI drivers on windows and on GNU/Linux side. With different motherboards and different 3D cards and with different drivers. Many users bashes ATI because they old driver style. My friend dont have any issues with ATI on windows but linux side he has. I didnt have 9700 on Linux side but with windows i did. Now on 8600GT i get so much problems that it's just enought just to mention that i have them. Best drivers what i have seen has come from Intel and #2 position is ATI

  • Suspending? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by The Analog Kid (565327) on Tuesday October 23 2007, @04:07PM (#21091387)
    Can you suspend your laptop using these drivers. There was a problem using the 8.40.3 drivers and any distro that uses the SLUB allocator that causes the system to hang while trying to suspend. Since most distros (if not all) are moving to SLUB this is a pretty big issue, ATI is usually behind the 8-ball though so I'm not getting my hopes up.
    • Unfortunately, no.

      I'm crossing my fingers hoping that an astute developer who knows the power management ins and outs of the kernel, X, and the suspend/hibernate routines figures out what the problem is in the next couple of days.

      Hopefully it's a simple fix, although those always seem to be the hardest fixes, eh?
      • The SLUB problem was that laptop would never complete suspend. The manifistation of it was that the half-moon would just keep blinking and never go solid. Now with 8.42 (mind you, hacked for a FireGL PCIID), it completes suspend. Resuming however, has yet to return me a working screen. However, if I kill X with alt-sysrq-k, and I can set capslock and change VTs, indicating it almost works. I'll play with the resume scripts, but it appears that the SLUB-blocking-suspend was addressed, but for some stran

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Wizarth (785742)
          Interesting, I've noticed since upgrading to Gutsy my laptop (with ATI video chipset) wouldn't suspend, would shut down the PCMCIA WiFi card but then leave me at a blank screen (blinking cursor, I think, not in front of it right now). I hadn't played with it yet though. I thought it might be because I modified the sleep/resume scripts slightly, when I was having some issues with said wifi card, ndiswrapper, WPA and sleeping.
          • So far, I've gotten it to suspend, and resume successfully in Gutsy, *but* the catch that makes it useless, is I essentially make /etc/acpi/resumed/65-console.sh *not* attempt a single chvt, and so I can never get back to X. So the kernel seems fine, but X won't come back and chvt will hang in the process. Have tried saving vbestate and post_video, and neither, but of those two there is no success. The graphics did work with the vbestate saving and post_video in text consoles though....
  • I've been waiting for updated ATI drivers for non-x86 platforms (e.g. PPC) for a while now due to problems with the open-source existing DRI drivers being pretty crap on my specific card (iMac G3 with Rage 128).

    Does anybody know if it's likely that i'll be able to get these working, or is all the GL stuff wrapped up in proprietary x86 only code?

  • I don't normally reply twice, but... (Score:5, Informative)

    by MostAwesomeDude (980382) on Tuesday October 23 2007, @04:39PM (#21091815) Homepage
    ...this is not an open-source driver.

    There are three ATI drivers. There is fglrx, which is this driver that was just released. There is radeon, which is the open-source driver that controls Rages, R200s, R300s, and R400s. And there is radeonhd, which controls R500s and R600s.

    fglrx has many issues. It now has AIGLX, but it still has broken XComposite. Xvideo doesn't work for many people. Direct 3D rendering is slower than on Windows. The entire driver is closed-source and shims a binary blob into the kernel. But, it still offers 3D for R400, R500, and R600 chipsets.

    radeon is the dependable open-source driver for older Radeon-based and Rage-based cards. It works excellently, with direct rendering for all chipsets up to the R200 series. People are working on R300/R400 direct rendering right now; see http://tirdc.livejournal.com/ [livejournal.com] .

    radeonhd is a brand-new open-source driver that controls new R500 and R600 cards. It has no direct rendering yet, but there is a promise from ATI/AMD that documents pertaining to direct rendering will be released sometime soon without NDA. This driver is still being worked on, but it offers satisfactory 2D for many people.

    • Direct 3D rendering is slower than on Windows [with fglrx].

      If it's still slower, it's only by a tiny margin now. fglrx 8.42 is *hugely* faster than 8.40 and below. My Radeon X1400 now runs Doom 3 at 37.1 fps (1024x768, medium quality), compared to the 21 fps it got before with the same settings.

      fglrx still has issues, but its 3D performance is no longer one of them.

    • Hi there,

      Good post. s/D3D/OGL. Probably was a typo/brainFart.
       
      BBH

  • Does AMD have a developer/beta channel? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by r_jensen11 (598210) on Tuesday October 23 2007, @04:52PM (#21092009)
    Because I think then many of these issues could get resolved more quickly. By "these issues," I mean things like better Compiz support and more modern kernel support. Fortunately*, I don't even upgrade my kernel more than two or three times a year (unless there's some major feature or fix that I happen to read), so not supporting the latest & greatest kernel isn't a major issue for me.

    *I know that this leaves me vulnerable to security exploits, but I'd rather take my chances with that than not being able to use my programs at all because of an incompatibility. Plus, I've gone through upgrading after every kernel revision and it just gets tiring. There are many systems that are up for a longer period of time than whenever each kernel upgrade is released, so I have a feeling I'm not alone here, either.

  • So what's the estimate... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Amphetam1ne (1042020) on Tuesday October 23 2007, @05:59PM (#21092831)
    ..until I can get hardware H.264/AVC1 decoding in LinuxMCE using my Radeon HD card then? Months? Years? the day after the next big encoding standard is released?

  • Goati? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Elyscape (882517) <elyscape@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Tuesday October 23 2007, @06:08PM (#21092957) Homepage
    Am I the only one who saw the tag "goati", became confused, and read "goatse"?

  • URL (Score:2, Informative)

    by detain (687995)
    ati.com was still linking to the old driver for me, im not sure if it is for everyone else, however, this URL
    should let you download the new driver:

    https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/ati-driver-installer-8.42.3-x86.x86_64.run [akamai.net]
  • When they release an Open Source driver for a newer card, let me know. There occasional announcement of vague future plans just don't cut it. In the meantime I'm going to back to sleep.

    p.s. Oooh! I just dissed ATI! Expect this post to be modded into oblivion within ten minutes.
  • At least the new overlords of ATI (AMD, for those not in the know) are actually making a halfway decent effort to support nix. While granted, they have a LONG way to go to meet even the quality of nVidia's drivers, at least its a step in the right direction, instead of the old "We'll make one, but we're really not going to put any effort into it" attitude. Hey, sometimes we have to be thankful for even small miracles.
    • agreed, the gutsy restricted driver requires you go back to both sideport and UMA video memory instead of just the sideport/onboard memory. This used to work years ago, then recently started working a few months back but now is broken again. WTF, there are probably atleast a few million 200M laptop/mobo users.

      LoB

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