radeon driver heading in wrong direction :-(.

[Tom Horsley]

On Mon, 1 Feb 2010 14:23:57 +0000
Marko Vojinovic wrote:

> Given the alleged 
> availability of hardware specs, I'd expect the driver to progress much faster 
> than it actually does.

There is a link on the xorg web site somewhere to a batch of pdf files
provided by amd/ati (I saw it once, but don't remember how to navigate
to it again :-).

The real problem is likely to be that the developers for ati cards
actually believe the docs - often docs are more of a hindrance than
a help when hardware revs happen several times with no change to the
docs, etc. You write code that does just what the docs say, then
waste vast amounts of time looking for bugs you know can't be in that
code because it precisely follows the docs :-). I think the lack
of docs may be why nouveau seems to be making better progress...

What we need is to take a year, devise some test programs people
can run to check the actual behavior of video cards against the
individual bits of information described in the docs, then encourage
folks to run the tests and report all the flaws in the docs which
we could then ask ati to explain (but that is unlikely to happen,
it is just a fantasy I have :-).