radeon driver heading in wrong direction :-(.
Gene Heskett
gene.heskett at verizon.net
Mon Feb 1 15:21:05 UTC 2010
On Monday 01 February 2010, Tom Horsley wrote:
>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 :-).
Actually Tom, you have company in that fantasy. A decade ago, I asked on this
list what the best card was at the time & several said a certain ati card.
So I bought one the very next day. No workee. Seems ati had changed the
chipset out for a brand new one, and had done it without changing the size of
a single dot above an i anyplace on the box. I took it back saying that the
card in the box wasn't the card I thought I bought, and wasn't compatible,
got an nvidia which mostly worked with the then current nv driver, but it
failed post less than a year later.
So the test suite fantasy really does sound like a great idea.
Thanks for reading.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Q: Why did the lone ranger kill Tonto?
A: He found out what "kimosabe" really means.
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