The ati petition

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 03 September 2004 01:48, Vladimir Dergachev wrote:
>Hmm.. IMO, it is rather ill-conceived. One could achieve more by
> asking less.
>
>For example:
>
>       "The signers of this petition will no longer purchase ATI
> products until ATI make a workable 3D accelerated 64-bit driver for
> Linux and a 32-bit that utilizes the full potential of the Raedon
> chips."
>
>        Linux (and BSD) is not just about ia32/ia64. We should be
> asking for a way to utilize full graphics and video capabilities on
> any platform.
>
>       "In the event that ATI cannot handle the programming of these
>drivers, we require all modern ATI chips to be open sourced to the
> Linux community so that drivers can be made. "
>
>        It is not necessary to have full source code to the chips
>themselves to write a driver, rather just a good description on how
> to *access* the chip. (In case you don't know chips are designed
> using VHDL or Verilog - programming languages, so designing a chip
> is somewhat similar to writing a paper in TeX).
>
>        More importantly, the petition tone is antagonistic, as it
>implicitly asks for ATI to surrender to its demands. This is
> pointless as even if this goal were achieved it would have no
> bearing on a technical issue - getting ATI graphics cards well
> supported in Linux.

I agree with that "antagonistic" assessment, and almost didn't sign it 
myself because of that.  OTOH, they are now up to 14k sigs, and 
probably about plateaued. 14k isn't a number marketing is going to 
pay any attention to in the big picture, that want 7 digit figure in 
all columns.

Its only advantage is that if they ever get to where that last 14k of 
sales might count, it might be considered.  As is, its probably just 
a pissing contest.

One things for sure, the present situation (and you are holding nvidia 
up as a shineing example, erroniously so IMO) has become intolerable 
for the user, who either breaks his system trying to install the 
nvidia stuff, or suffers thru the intolerably slow drivers we do 
have.  ATM I have an ATI designed card installed, replacing an nvidia 
that broke, and took the motherboard out as it did so.  An nvidia 
card that never was right from the gitgo 2 years ago.

I'm sick of being treated as third class citizens in the video dept by 
all the vendors peddling such gear just because we're allergic to 
windoze.  The petition seemed to be somewhat better than a poke in 
the eye with a sharp stick, so I signed it.

>        I strongly suggest the writer of the petition to read
> through (if he or she has not done so already) the following link:
>
>http://dri.sourceforge.net/doc/vendor_relationships_paper.html
>
>        Also, it is important to note that Precision Insight (and,
> in particular, Frank La Monica) had big problems persuading ATI to
> release specs to allow 3d support for Rage128 and Radeons and
> undoing the history of angry e-mails demanding documentation and
> flat refusals to provide it.

And then we should see some 3d support for radeons at some point?  
Sorry, tuxracer still brings this machine to it knees at about 1 
frame every 2 seconds, and requires a reboot once you spend 10 
minutes finding the quit button with the mouse as the lag is truely 
surreal.  All other keyboard input seems to be locked out.  IMO, not 
a friendy game at all.  Games that reconfigure X, possibly even 
damaging the monitor when they do, should totally restore X to its 
original configuration when the exit.

The machine?  AMD 2800XP.  Biostar M7-NCD-Pro Motherboard.  A gig of 
DDR333 dual channel ram, and an Extacy 9200SE 128 meg card.  I 
certainly ought to be able to run tuxracer.

>       It would be much better to petition ATI for something to
> cooperate with - for example a standardized way to encapsulate
> driver in architecture-indepedent code so they can keep their
> proprietary stuff, but let open source handle the rest.

Uh huh, and give *us* enough info that we can do the 'encapsulation'.  

But I must confess that I use the *us* in the broad "group" sense here 
Vladimir, I find I'm not as quick as I was 20 years ago on smaller 
hardware.  But then my next birthday will be my 70th too.  Does that 
make me an old fart, eligible for the discount?  Yup...  :-)


>                           best
>
>                             Vladimir Dergachev
>
>On Thu, 2 Sep 2004, Gene Heskett wrote:
>> Greetings;
>>
>> Has anyone heard of any fallout from this "open the src" petition
>> to ati?   There is a link to it on LWN.
>>
>> I see there were over 13k signatures when I was there a day back,
>> seems that should be a bit of a wakeup call, if only they'd fire
>> all the attorneys first.
>>
>> --
>> 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)
>> 99.24% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
>> Yahoo.com attorneys please note, additions to this message
>> by Gene Heskett are:
>> Copyright 2004 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.
>> _______________________________________________
>> xorg mailing list
>> xorg at freedesktop.org
>> http://freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg

-- 
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)
99.24% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
Yahoo.com attorneys please note, additions to this message
by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2004 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.