[mythtv] AMD To Drop Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 Catalyst Support: (was: Re: MythTV 0.26, XVideo, and OpenGL)

Lennart Sorensen lsorense at csclub.uwaterloo.ca
Fri Apr 20 22:59:39 UTC 2012


On Sat, Apr 21, 2012 at 08:27:04AM +1000, Jean-Yves Avenard wrote:
> That doesn't make their existing drivers stop working from one day to the
> next.
> No new features are added in the new drivers for the old hardware, it's
> always the same code carried forward.

Well my experience has unfortunately been that the existing drivers
generally don't work that well either.  The last fglrx that support R300
series (which of course they dropped support for while still selling
them), would crash the machine if you didn't explicitly put 24 bit colour
in the Xorg.conf.  The default of 256 colour simply died.  Why the default
was something that crashed it I don't know, but it sure was annoying.

We have since removed all ATI cards from workstations at work because
they are simply not supportable for linux use.  Everything is now nvidia
if multi monitor is needed, and onboard intel otherwise.

> So why would this be a problem? Have an old card, use the existing and
> working drivers. Simple..

Some major changes in the Xorg driver interface broke the nvidia drivers.
Apparently it was way more work to fix the old legacy 96xx drivers than
they thought, so they never did update the 75xx series at all even though
they had originally intended to.  The 173xx legacy series were easier
to update since they were much closer to the current drivers that they
were already updating.

So sometimes the Xorg interface does change in drastic ways, for good
reasons, and then any binary drivers have to be updated to continue
working.  Same thing with the kernel interface for the kernel module
piece, although since there is source code for the wrapper, it is often
possible to fix that yourself (but not always).

-- 
Len Sorensen


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