[conspire] supported graphics cards

[Edmund Biow]

> Date: Fri, 28 Jun 2013 14:41:51 -0700
> From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
> To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
> Subject: Re: [conspire] supported graphics cards?
> Message-ID: <20130628214151.GH2920 at linuxmafia.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-15
>
>
> Once again, though, I will add that all this pissing and moaning about
> how the open-source X.org drivers fail to 'just work' and how
> vendor-specific proprietary code -- code that, by the way, has such a
> horrific record of introducing critical bugs into kernelspace that the
> Linux kernel community had to invent the whole 'taint' flag
> infrastructure so they weren't overwhelmed with misdirected bug reports
> caused by secret vendor code -- is the right solution concerns brand-new
> (6 mos. to 1 yr. old) chipsets.
>
> Me, I'd do the intelligent thing and let other people be the beta
> testers.
>
> I can't help noticing that, by eschewing chipsets nobody's had time to
> work out good open-source support for, I consistently end up with zero
> driver problems.  Coincidence?  You decide.
I think maybe luck may have had something to do with it, maybe the open
source is with you, Rick.  Unfortunately I have found that it often
takes quite a bit more than a year for the open source driver to make
hardware fully functional.

For instance I bought a couple of AMD Zacate E350 very low powered
CPU/mobos in April, 2011, a few months after they came out.  One dual
boots Ubuntu 13.04 with the proprietary FGLRX and Debian testing with
the open source radeon driver, the other has Debian stable. The first
few months were really a PITA, especially on Debian.  Sound didn't work
at all in Debian until I upgraded to the Liquorix kernel, video was
crappy, I couldn't log out without the screen going black, I couldn't
get in to a TTY, the screen would just become black until I rebooted
using the Magic SysRq commands. In Ubuntu early on even the proprietary
driver wasn't great, I couldn't play 1080p content in 11.10. But 12.04
1080p would play, but with artifacts and choppiness. FGLRX was mostly
fine for 1080p in 12.10, and now it works fine after upgrading to 13.04.
The Debian testing install is able to play 1080p now that the
post-Squeeze release freeze has broken up using the 3.9.1-amd kernel,
but with artifacts and tearing. The radeon driver worked OK using the
liquorix kernel on the Debian stable system in Squeeze (no HD video, of
course). But after I upgraded the system to Wheezy (current stable) I
got a second monitor and I couldn't get it to work with the open source
driver. I know all about xrandr commands, how to craft a xorg.conf, how
to create modelines, but it just wouldn't work until I installed the
proprietary driver.  At this point the system is over 2 years old and
using the open source driver is still marginal.

I'm not a gamer, I just want my system to play HD video and gracefully
do dual monitors. Many desktop environments are expecting more and more
out of video chipsets, particularly Unity and Gnome 3, both of which are
periodically threatening to eliminate 2D fallback mode. The open source
driver often simply can't do direct rendering while the proprietary
driver can.  Especially on low power/low energy systems the GPU is
expected to pull a lot of weight in making the OS experience smooth. 
Writing video drivers is apparently extremely demanding, even harder
than kernel writing according to one well-informed person I talked to on
IRC. Big companies are not particularly interested, Linux doesn't make
up much of the desktop market and servers don't require particularly
fluid desktop support. 

This brings up another difference between ATI & Nvidia. Nvidia supports
its older hardware with its proprietary driver for a relatively long
time.  Current versions of xorg can still use the older version of the
Nvidia driver for systems as old as the Geforce2 from 2000, more than a
dozen years. Modern version of xorg no longer support the proprietary
71xx driver so you can get rudimentary 3D support for ancient TNT
hardware. 

The fglrx proprietary ATI driver only supports a very narrow range of
recent hardware and drops support after a few years.  You may have to
work at it to get fglrx to support HD 2000 (R600), which was released
2006-7. Luckily, in my limited experience by the time the proprietary
driver is no longer available the open source driver has matured to the
point that it will support things like dual monitors & KMS/DRM
reasonably well.
 
I really want to support AMD/ATI because I don't want there to be an
Intel monopoly for desktop CPUs, but getting the stuff to work properly
can be a challenge.