Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (340 mails)

[Stefan Dirsch <sndirsch@xxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 02:37:59AM -0500, David C. Rankin wrote:
> Listmates,
>
>       There are 2 issues that need to be addressed regarding the fglrx driver 
> and
> the upcoming 11.2 release. Currently in 11.1, there are many laptop cards
> supposedly "supported" by the ATI driver that crash or hardlock when the 
> driver
> is installed. Currently my X1200 is one, 

I doubt that 9-3 driver and before will still work on xorg-server 1.6.
9-4 and later won't support R500 any longer. You'll need to switch to
radeonhd for 11.2 anyway.  BTW, radeonhd 1.2.5 now enables DRI on R500
by default.

> the 200 is another from the list (I'm
> not sure what the technical card architecture is for the "200"). 

Don't know either.

> Suffice it to say, this is a significant problem for all affected
> users. The issues that need to be addressed pre-11.2 are:
>
> (1)   Performance issues and crashes caused by the ATI driver. Recent driver
> problems: The 9-2 driver release caused my Toshiba 205d laptop to reboot on 
> xdm
> start and the 9-3 driver caused my laptop to hardlock if glxgears was started.
> All fglrx drivers 8-10 through 8-12 had performance of less than 60% of the 
> 8-9
> driver. Compounding the problem is the fact that nothing prior to the 8-12
> driver will even compile or run on 11.1 or later (presuming 11.2 as well)

I don't see what the openSUSE community can do here. ATI is only
interested in bugs, if they affect and being reported by big vendors
like e.g. HP. But these big vendors are only interested in using
SLES/SLED.

>       Thankfully, there are some cards that seem to do OK with the recent 9-3 
> driver
> on 11.1, but it is hit or miss ...and... the fact that it works on "some" does
> nothing to address and help the users where it "does not" work. Before the 
> 11.2
> release, Novell needs to get a handle on what cards will and will not run with
> the ATI driver and at least incorporate a warning or release note for those
> with affected hardware.

Novell does not have the ressources (in hardware and time) to do such
testing. 9-4 will still support more than 100 different ASIC IDs
(although no longer supporting R300-R500) with more than 20 different
chip families for desktops and laptops.

> (2)   Confirm - ATI driver support will be dropped for all R300-R500 ATI cards
> post 9-3 driver release (per phoronix.com ATI forum). 

This is confirmed, yes.

> This is another *biggie* Novell needs to get its arms around, to
> again, either incorporate into the installer a way to not install
> the driver on non-supported hardware 

Sure, we won't autselect the driver packages on hardware, which is no
longer supported.

> or identify and warn about the lack of support for all R300-R500
> cards.

For these radeon/radeonhd will be used with DRI enabled by default.
BTW, the situation is not really new. We had this before than ATI
dropped support for R200 cards and we needed to switch to radeon
driver for DRI support.

>       That means no (nada) fglrx driver support for the R300-R500 series 
> cards which
> include the: 9500, 9600, 9700, 9800, X300, X550, X600, X700, X800, X850
> AllInWonder, and X1050 cards affecting all laptops bought before Q3 2005 (or
> January 2007 in the case of the X1050). All of which are still *very* 
> prevalent
> in the group of laptops that make up the installed user base today and will
> continue to do so through 11.2 release. This issue of dropping support is
> separate and apart from issue (1) above because the group of cards in (1) are
> supposedly still supported.

by radeon/radeonhd driver, yes.

>                       Other Thoughts:
>
>       After Stefan Dirsch handed over the reins of driver maintainer to Bob 
> Walmsley
> <bob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> I guess he is now the guy that this should be 
> coordinated
> through. I am glad to try and help, and to run test cases, etc. since I drew
> the black bean in laptop selection so let me know if/when there are new cases
> to test. I follow the ATI driver releases and test each one so I have a good
> handle on where things stand today. The problem is that Novell needs to use 
> its
> resources to get a working partner in ATI to address some of these issues.
> Luugi Marsan <atilinuxnovellbugs@xxxxxxx> was in the past the ATI contact, but
> at present, I haven't a clue who the ATI contact is or even if there is one.
> Without a good contact, we are dead-in-the-water getting any of these issues
> addressed and we are guaranteed a significant number of stranded users if 
> these
> issues are not addressed.

Bob is maintaining the openSUSE packaging scripts, he's doing an
excellent job and I'm happy he took over. But I doubt that he wants to
act as proxy between the openSUSE community and ATI. I'm not aware of
a contact at ATI for openSUSE. As said before ATI is mainly interested
into supporting big vendors (using SLES/SLED).

BTW, Bob applied for Membership ("AussieBob") with openSUSE, but his
profile still states that it's under review (after about 3 months
now). He would have preferred to use an @opensuse.org mail address for
the maintainer contact of the openSUSE's fglrx packaging scripts
instead of fglrx@xxxxxxxx, but obviously it's hard to become part of
this community. :-(

> Right now the 8-9 driver works fine for 10.3 and 11.0, but unfortunately it is
> incompatible with 11.1. The ATI issues prevent me, and all others affected,
> from being able to move to 11.1. Hopefully, if Novell will start now to 
> address
> some of these driver issues with ATI, then by 11.2 release  they have a good
> chance of ironed out.

I don't see what Novell can do here apart from tracking bugreports
filed against SLE11.

>       With a desktop, you can always rip the ATI card out and replace it. 
> With a
> laptop ... you are kind-of stuck.

Of course.

Best regards,
Stefan

Public Key available
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FAX: 0911-740 53 479          D-90409 Nürnberg
http://www.suse.de            Germany 
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