[ale] Is ATI Linux compatibility good?

[Michael B. Trausch]

On 03/29/2010 08:33 AM, Charles Shapiro wrote:
> Uh, I don't think they're dropping it. They're just supporting
> **only** their closed-source driver, with no published stuff to allow
> other people to write drivers.

Correct.

It seems that older versions of the NVIDIA drivers, IME, work just fine 
(well, that is, unless you get a card that the older drivers don't 
support).  The problem lately I think is that there have been a lot of 
changes in the Xorg system and the way that it handles various things, 
and of course the free software drivers that are open for modification 
can keep up with these sorts of changes more quickly.  It also helps 
when the kernel-half of the driver can be updated to match API changes 
in the kernel (nobody in the kernel world cares about ABI compatibility 
for drivers, since all the in-tree drivers that are needed are built 
against the kernel when it is rebuilt anyway).

This is, I think, a key part of the argument for free software that many 
people seem to ignore.  For example, the Free Software Foundation would 
have everyone decide to use free software for the sake of using software 
that isn't proprietary, but this is not very practical for most people. 
  But there are some practical arguments that make sense for those who 
aren't completely fanatical in nature.

As an example, due to the open development process that the Linux kernel 
uses, and the fact that majority of the drivers for the kernel are 
in-tree drivers, they feel (and rightly so, I think) that they can 
change the API and the ABI any time they please.  This presents a bit of 
a problem for binary-only drivers (or even out-of-tree drivers) since 
they are not maintained in lock-step with the current kernel.  It's an 
even larger problem for binary-only drivers in that there can never be 
backports without action from the sole producers of the binary-only drivers.

I've never really been able to use the open-source "nv" driver with any 
of the chipsets that I have owned, and the nvidia driver works well on 
most (though abysmally on two of the ones that I have, and one of those 
is, I think, a hardware issue and not a driver one).  I have to say that 
I am glad that there is a free software driver for the ATI chipsets that 
works as well as it seems to work.  I just hope that the hardware + 
driver combination in my laptop (and its exceptional performance and 
reliability) isn't a fluke of some sort.

	--- Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch                                    ☎ (404) 492-6475