AMD deciding _now_ what to do about Linux

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 16 June 2007, Dotan Cohen wrote:
>On 16/06/07, Gene Heskett <gene.heskett at verizon.net> wrote:
>> On Saturday 16 June 2007, Dotan Cohen wrote:
>> >On 16/06/07, Earl Violet <ejviolet at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> >>  Where do I contact them?  I looked at their site but am not sure.
>> >>
>> >> Earl Violet
>> >
>> >This page has all their contact information:
>> >http://ati.amd.com/companyinfo/contact/index.html
>> >
>> >Dotan Cohen
>>
>> Thanks Dotan, a rather lengthy plea for support has been submitted, now we
>> wait.
>
>Very good, Gene. I can just imagine what _you_ wrote to them. I hope
>you weren't to harsh! And don't forget, those California folk don't
>understand much West Virginian.
>
>Dotan Cohen
>
>http://lyricslist.com/
>http://what-is-what.com/

I pretty well stayed out of the vernacular, figured them silicon valley folks 
would have enough trouble understanding english with a midwestern Iowa 
accent..

But I did replay my history with ati cards, which has been far less than 
stellar if you get my drift.  Being told once that support for card # 
so-and-so was perfect, I went and bought one the next day, only to find that 
the card in the box had a new, completely unsupported chipset on it without 
so much as changing the color of the dot over any i on the box or its 
packing.  That cost me about $125 by the time I gave it to the neighbors to 
get it to somebody that could maybe use it.  Then x got rid of the support 
for the next one I bought, a 9200SE-256 I bought new at Circuit City 4 years 
ago now, so I had to go buy an nvidia 6200 which I'm using now.

But that use of the nvidia binary makes my kernel tainted, and with the 
exception of Ingo Molnar, who is interested in the scheduler test reports I 
send, the rest of the kernel crew just tells me to go pound sand, and 
rightfully so.  After the false start of the open src video card, which seems 
to have stumbled and fallen before production could even be priced, we are 
beholden to nvidia and they're throwing of binary blobs over the fence if we 
want anything with a reasonable rendering speed.

No one in his right mind thinks that is a good deal, but damnit, its the best 
we've got, and its one hell of an achilles heel...

I pleaded for a complete API spec, under NDA if the lawyers insisted, but 
complete so we could write our own fast 3d drivers, that way they would get 
the linux driver for free.  Using the we of course in the mouse in my pocket 
sense since it won't be me who does the code, my days of coding up something 
that fancy are long past.

I also pointed out that if they were to do that, they would inherit the linux 
users almost en-mass _once_ we had a driver.  They would be able to see a 
genuine uptick in sales with the extra going to linux users.

So like I said, now we wait.  If 1000 other linux users felt strongly to go 
bug them about it, maybe.  But if 250,000 tell them the same thing, can they 
still refuse a market like that?  They are at the end of the day, interested 
in selling the chipset to the card makers.

-- 
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)
<Knghtbrd> I can think of lots of people who need USER=ID10T someplace!