AMD deciding _now_ what to do about Linux

[Larry Hartman]

On Sunday 17 June 2007 12:12:01 am Gene Heskett wrote:
> 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!

Yeah I can concur about experiences with ATI bugs.  Two versions ago I 
couldn't log-out without restarting X.....now I can not switch to other 
virtual terminals.  arghh.  I think I will spend some time this week to write 
a note myself.  If marketing principles are sound, my vote ought to be 
representative of a thousand people or so.  Or am I thinking too much of 
myself--maybe they only see me as half a person?

Larry