AMD will soon deliver open graphics drivers, said Henri Richard just a few minutes ago, and the audience at the opening keynote of the Red Hat Summit broke into applause and cheers. Richard, AMD's executive vice president of sales and marketing, promised: "I'm here to commit to you that it's going to get done." He also promised that AMD is "going to be very proactive in changing way we interface with the Linux community".
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Member since:2007-04-30
This ain't no good news. This is the all the same bullshit, AMD is becoming the same opensource fraud Intel already is.
Thanks for nothing, AMD.
We don't want your filthy code, full of magic numbers.
What about providing full and free documentation for your chips, so we can code our own maintainable and quality opensource drivers?
Member since:2006-01-07
"AMD is becoming the same opensource fraud Intel already is."
Intel is an open-source fraud, now? How so?
They are working with the upstream X/Mesa people to get quality drivers into the standard X.org distribution in a timely fashion. Sure, their binary-only regulatory daemon was evil; but they're fixing that with the iwlwifi driver (which has that regulatory software as part of the firmware). They want people to be able to buy their hardware and have it "Just Fricking Work" with Linux and BSD. No screwing with configurations or kernel modules or anything. It should automagically work and work to its fullest.
Sure, their drivers are still not feature-complete, but they run well enough to use Compiz/Beryl quite smoothly, have nice EXA support, and support Xrandr 1.2; and they've told us that things like hardware-offloading of motion compensation (XvMC), HD video decoding, etc. are in development, slated for publishing within the next several months.
Quite frankly, a company which has such devotion to making their hardware F/OSS-friendly rightly DESERVES our business.
My new workstation is almost entirely Intel-based, for what it's worth - An E6600 processor, an onboard G965 video chipset ("GMA X3000") and HD audio, etc. I'm quite pleased with its functionality. The only thing I wish I had was an Intel wireless ethernet card, as my current Prism2-based card is starting to show its age...
So I ask you again: How is this fraudulent on the part of Intel?
Member since:2007-02-19
Member since:
2007-04-06
If they really follow up their announcement, it would be nothing short of amazing. I guess I understand now why those open source 'zealots' kept on insisting on open drivers. Now let's watch out for nNvidia!