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.