Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 22nd Feb 2006 22:15 UTC, submitted by Kombatant
"ATI's R5xx line was first released back in October 2005. The initial launch covered the X1800 and X1300 series, with the X1600 series following suit in November. Last month we saw the release of the new X1900 series too. Now, let me count the months from October to February; it is 5 months, right? Well, believe it or not, that's the number of months the new X1000 series is out in the market without Linux support. If you are unfortunate enough to own such a card, all you have is Matthew Tippett's statement in Phoronix."
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Member since:
2006-01-26
The problem isn't ATI here, but Linux, GCC, and binary compatibility. It requires vendors like ATI to release new binaries (that need some tweaking) too often.
Last I looked we were on OSNEWS -- where Alternative OSes are the discussion topic of choice. Since hardware support is probably the primary issue that alternative OSes face - I would say that you appear to be trolling...
I'm not sure what you're proposing is the solution here. Is there some magical way that a hardware-interfacing driver is going to be magically cross-platform capable? I've heard of some ideas like this before, but they seem to have their limitations - and last I checked, no hardware manufacturers were interested in supporting them anyway.
But in any case: wouldn't something like this force all OSes to use the same driver model?
Wouldn't that hinder the ability for alternative OSes to make better use of resources and hardware and even exist for different architecture choices?