AMD basically kills proprietary Linux drivers
 

As I ranted already in an earlier thread, AMD support for Linux is going downhill. Now they made it official: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTExMTA
New drivers are in future only released when new games demand it (on the Windows side, who knows what about Linux). Catalyst 12.4 was the last version that supported the HD2/3/4XXX chips, so no Xorg server 1.12 support for those chips and no 32 bit kernels 3.2.8 and higher without manually patching the drivers.
This renders my laptop useless for any future Slackware release as long as the open source drivers have their power management issues (if they ever get fixed, which I really doubt at this time).

For me there is only one conclusion: If AMD decides to stop support for my 2 and a half years old laptop I will stop supporting AMD. The future is Intel/Nvidia for me and I will not recommend AMD for anyone using Linux anymore. I really regret that I bought a new AMD video card for my workstation a few months ago, Nvidia would have been a better choice.
AMD really makes me angry.

Since the proprietary driver is now the only option for you and presumably a lot of others, I think its fair to assume that work on the driver from the community will be picking up a lot in the near future. The power problem might get patched now that people have a tangible reason to put effort into it.

Member response
 

Hi,

I too find this as a sad issue. I have a AMD based laptop and will hopefully get to use it for a few more years somehow.

Reminds me of the drop of the r300-r500 for my Dell 1501 which is still in use but no new support.

Damn crystal ball was wrong again! :(

I hope so, but sadly open source developers (lacking a boss to tell them at what to work) often tend to do more work on things that are new and interesting (like OpenCL or support for newer chipsets) than on boring things like power management and the like. I just hope that somebody will do the things needed.
For the time being I downgraded the laptop from -current (wasn't updated to the new Xorg anyways) to 13.37. Thank Bob I am using a distro with longtime support, so even if things go bad I still can use the machine for quite some time. Ironically, my older netbook with the GMA950 video chip works fine with -current and will do that for some time in the future, I hope.

I would have to say I've never liked AMD much for linux and for my latest purchase I avoided them. Not saying NVIDIA is any better (grumble Optimus grumble)...

I made that decision about 6 or 7 years ago. For me, AMD is to hardware what Adobe is to software - for Linux that is. I tell people to avoid AMD cards as they seem to be nothing but trouble in my experience.

Exactly. It will be interesting how the next few years pan out. I don't know much about Apple but it seems they're pissing off their devs though not as much as Microsoft seems to be. I dream of an Android-like environment for computers where OEMs realise they can differentiate with linux and sponsoring a distro. They can have teams to improve drivers and push for better drivers, even adding tweaks to the DE or whatever. I think PCs benefit from that a lot more than phones do.

The thing is the inertia of getting all these companies to change.

I suggest avoiding anything that requires closed drivers if at all possible. You never know what might happen. Nvidia is not all that much better and still stops support sometimes on somethings. Intel video is coming along and might be just fine for some people, depending on what you need to do. Do your research and see what will work for you. If you can give your money to a company that is friendly to open source and Linux, why would you not want to as long as it will suite your needs?

I have tried to do that, but especially with laptops and graphics cards it's hard to do.

The goal of a hardware manufacturer is to sell hardware. Based on that simple premise, one would assume that they would make software drivers for ALL operating systems, especially Linux to sell to the most customers. Why limit your market????

When my Cannon printer runs out of ink, I will be buying (grumble) an HP printer since Cannon refuses to make a Linux driver. Yes, there is a Linux driver, which works well with B/W, but when it comes to color - not so good.

I sometimes wonder if Microsoft and/or Apple may secretly discourage hardware manufactures from writing Linux drivers. Time-Warner, for example, made a deal with Blockbuster where Blockbuster would "hold" a new release for about a month so that Time-Warner could advertise how they had movies that were not yet available at Blockbuster. Deceptive advertising. Warner Brothers Will Make Netflix, Redbox, Blockbuster Wait Longer for New Movies

Well, AMD pretends to be Linux and open source friendly. They have developers that are paid to work on the open source drivers and they give some of the information needed to write free drivers out. I understand that they may have reasons to not give out information regarding UVD (the video decoding unit), because they fear that the restricted playback chain for Bluray on Windows may be compromised and their may also be third party IP involved, but come on, they don't give information out for basic functions like power management. What the heck is that? HDMI audio support is there in newer kernels for the cards up to the HD5XXX series not because AMD gave information to the FOSS developers, but because they reverse engineered that function.

Basically you can say that the nouveau driver, which is completely reverse engineered, also a total lack of information from Nvidia, is in a better state than the radeon drivers, which AMD pretends to support with developers and information. This stinks.

Unfortunately, the creative programmers who backward-engineer drivers, I mean the real wizards of coding, don't seem to be very communicative people. Inversely communicative people, like me, are not that bright on wizard coding. The result is that knowledge is not being communicated and at some point we may run out of those magic people who write new drivers. (that is a private fear of mine. I may be wrong, it may be just a gut feeling.)

I don't know if I should cry or laugh. Phoronix just posted the changelog for Catalyst 12.6 Beta (12.5 will be omitted, due to their new release policy): http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTExMTU
Besides from what we already know: they surprised me with this:That is a direct slap in the face for any pre-HD5000 owner. It basically translates with: Go away, you suckers and buy new hardware, you will never run anything newer than you have now with our drivers, use our crappy OSS drivers, for which we maybe some time in the future will release the necessary specs.
My answer to this, as I have already stated earlier: I will go away and buy new hardware, but definitely not from a company with this attitude. I am normally not a fanboy of any hardware manufacturer, neither AMD, Intel nor Nvidia, but this behavior more or less makes me an AMD anti-fanboy. Go away AMD, you suck.

SO everyone if you want them to change - stop posting on a forum they'll never read and send them a letter. A near physical ink on paper letter. If enough people do, maybe they'll rethink their position.

Realize though, that as someone has pointed out that their business is to sell hardware. Eventually all harware reaches an EOL where it is (from the manufacturers standpoint) economincaly infeasible to support anymore, at least fully. In this case however the 4000 series are barely over 3 years old and a five year lifespan would be more appropriate.

nVidia are not much if any better so switching absed on this policy change may not gain you anything. Indeed a mass migration may only prove AMD was right and the Linux market is unupportable from an economic standpoint. I have used both nVidia and ATI. Both have good and bad points. Sadly the worst thing that happened to ATI was its purchase by AMD.

(written on a machine using a HD 4870 in Slackware)

No, their business is to sell hardware and deliver appropriate drivers for this hardware. The second point was never done right by AMD/ATI for Linux, nonetheless they claim themselves to be Linux friendly, which, as is seen now in the open, was nothing than a lie. Also, even if their business is only selling hardware, this is marketing at its worst, many customers (at least many of the Linux people) are really pissed of now.

The oldest series supported from their current drivers is the Geforce 6 series. Launched in 2004. Older chips get at least sometimes bugfixes and patches. The HD4000 series was launched in 2008 and is still sold as part of their motherboards with integrated graphics. It is not only that they won't support old chips anymore, they won't support currently sold hardware. Which basically means: If you want to use Linux then you can't use the hardware we just sold you to its fully extent, screw you, buy a newer discrete card.

I disagree. Not to react in the only way larger companies seem to understand, with stopping to buy their products, is a sign to AMD that they get away with their lies and bad support and that the Linux community is made of sheeps.

Wait for the next version. The driver for your card will not work on it. Of course you can try the FOSS drivers, if you don't mind bad power-management, not using parts of the hardware you have paid for (like UVD) and bad performance. I want to get what I pay for, not only a half of it.

Member response
 

Hi,

From Linux Today; AMD admits it has to work on improving Linux OpenCL supportMy personal assessment is that they are using the multiple Gnu/Linux as an excuse. Read the whole article to get the big picture.

Excuse me, but all distributions are based on the Linux kernel. Diversity in distribution is not related to driver development environment.

It is and isn't there is both X.org and XFree86 still both out ther and the cards need to work with both. I'll also lay odds that Robinson was only refering to their newest cards. AMD has ruined ATI imho and their handling of the product line, especially in Linux ahs been going downhill since the spring after the HD4xxx launch.

Beg you pardon, but nVidia IS better than ATI Radeon, and much better at that.
That is, if you concentrate on the positive side of it and omit the general complaint about "insufficient" support for linux. The latter I take as a given, so in my opinion, if there's something you're terribly missing in Linux, which IS supported in MS Win, then I see no other option than to run MS Win (sorry for having to admit it)...

The hw support is better in both nouveau and nVidia (proprietary) drivers.
I'm using an old laptop of 2004 makeup or so, 32Mb video memory. What can you expect to see on such piece of old junk with 500Mb of RAM?
Well, every modern distro (OpenSuSE and Ubuntu, for example) runs OK using nouveau. Sure, GNOME 3 runs in the fallback mode, which is fine for me. 2-monitor configuration is well supported, one being the laptop's 15" with poor colors, the other an LG 17". Whatever there is to squeeze out of 32Mb video, is all put to work and it works fine with nouveau. In this case nouveau shows itself as a far better option than the corresponding legacy nVidia driver, the latter being complete crap even compared to the good old (now dead) NV driver.

Now as AMD Catalyst drivers are concerned, they have caused me problems even on MS Win platform, where you would naturally expect little problems (cause every hw manufacturer loves M$, does he not??). I've never been that much impressed with AMD, time only proves my prejudices to be well-based.

Intel CPU & Graphics: in my experience these have been the best under linux. Given, too, Intel's effort in supporting Linux platform, I quite expect their CPU graphics core to have good support and performance in linux. Don't know in what state it is at present, as I'm quite satisfied so far running my 4 and 8 year-old hardware and don't yet upgrade.

Generally, though, right now I see no other option than to stick to nVidia for graphics cards. Though I must admit it, I don't use any advanced graphics functionality, so I'm not in a good position to give an expert opinion in this regard. But from what I can see at least a little bit beyond the surface, nVidia is OK and nouveau is fine and in active development.

Oh, and writing angry letters to these guys will hardly help much, I suspect.

From my experience, HP printer drivers have NOT improved of recently. So I'm using Samsung and am quite satisfied. True, that's B/W and I'm not aware what's going on in the realm of COLOR printing, but... if HP's B/W printer drivers perform poorly, why should I expect their color drivers to be any better?

Then nobody would use Linux anymore, since at one time there will always be missing something that is supported in Windows and not in Linux. The solution to this is not to run away to Microsoft, but to get that function in Linux. May take some time, but is a better solution.

I hated AMD's proprietary drivers. I always feared updates. Either the new Catalyst drivers would be incompatible with the latest Xorg, or my xorg.conf would be incompatible with the newest drivers. And even when everything was working, performance was poor.

I'm not gonna say nVidia's proprietary drivers are perfect, but far superior to AMD.

I maintain that the solution is in Linux and not in AMD, Nvidia and all those other big enterprises. Those magic programmers, those hacker geniuses have done wonders in linux with the little info they have had to work with.
I for one have a double boot linux (whatever flavor I'm with at the time) and some version of Windoze. I am on Windoze very rarely and only as a fallback for scanners, games, etc.
For music(planet CCRMA), graphics(Blender), writing, publishing, databases, servers, programming, trying out fun things (html canvas lately), it's linux all the way.
But we still have to nurture those magic talents out there.

I'm glad I recently switched from a completely AMD system (chipset, CPU, graphics) to an intel/Nvidia based system. Despite this being a downgrade the nouveau driver consistently outperforms radeon. ATI were never known for their OpenGL performance however.

hm, I rather meant some cases like this:
and then seeing all this (which view I completely share):
...I don't believe any Linux enthusiasts will even think of quitting Linux & turning back to Windows. I'm rather positive about it :).

I was rather in the mood to kill when I heard the news about AMD dropping support for HD 4000 cards. Now I know one company that won't be getting any of my money for my next build.

I'm running a 4890, and it definitely doesn't fall in the "legacy" hardware category. Sure it's not the most powerful card ever, but it serves my needs and any company that treats its customers like trash deserves no support, monetary or otherwise.

Of course it is not legacy. The HD4000 series is AMD's current solution for integrated video for their current top of the line FX CPUs. It is currently sold hardware, not legacy hardware.

This is not the first time AMD have done this, they also pulled support for the X series chips and older far too early... Back then the radeon driver was much less mature than it is today.

I've been an AMD user almost from the start. I used the early 486DX4 clones, the K5, K6/K6-2 CPUs and the Athlons from the XP up to the Athlon64 X2. I've used three different ATI cards after finally retiring my old voodoo5 in about 2003/4 (I like to make hardware last). I've always supported AMD, but will never buy AMD again.

Luckily I switched to Nvidia just in time as my HD 3xxx series chip will no longer be supported.

AMD's attitude seems to be that the radeon driver supports the r600/r700 well enough.

Same here, I started with AMD from the DX, and up to the Phenom II X4. Used Matrox for my GPUs until they stopped consumer cards, then switched to ATI. Since AMD bought ATI, seems like AMD isn't doing so well. My last 3 GPUs have been nVidia, and for the first time since my Pentium 233mhz, I bought an Intel i7. I'm done buying AMDs GPUs, thought I may still buy their CPUs in the future.

imho the best way to get companies like AMD to change their ways is to target their wallets by not buying AMD products until they start releasing drivers for Linux. Plain and simple, if enough people boycott their video cards, maybe they'll take notice in their bottom line.
just my :twocents: for what it's worth, that and $7 will get you a weekend pass on the Metra system.

As far as the desktop cards are concerned, AMD considers it legacy. They've moved support to a legacy driver with quarterly updates on Windows. On Linux, support is non-existent now.

I was thinking of a new system a few months ago and AMD was my first choice for a CPU. After looking into it somewhat, AMD CPU's seem to have drastically fallen behind intel's Core series. Some of their recent products, like the bulldozer core have been a flop. Prices are also not as competitive as they were, value for money, which was always one of AMD's main selling points is not where it was a few years ago, so based on this and their approach to Linux support, my next (theoretical) system would probably be an intel/nvidia one unless things change in a big way.

I've got to give you points, Tobi. You've had the thead up for a while, and I've only seen one real 'anti-AMD GPU' comment since (and that was reasonable in its own way). Most people who've had a bit of rant like to be more biased than that. ;)

As for video support on linux, we are really down to 3 choices- AMD/ATI, nVidia and Intel.

AMD/ATI- not bad support really, though dropping 'legacy' closed driver support is annoying. At least they have released some documentation. XvBA is fairly lame. The actual GPU hardware is good. IMO AMD/ATI have always had driver issues, even on windows.

nVidia- not bad support agian, provided you dont want open source drivers. Face it, nVidia doesnt care about or even like nouveau, and the old open soruce (but obfuscated) .nv drivers are dropped. No release of documentation. VDPAU is the best of the hardware video decoding methods. The actual GPU hardware is good. nVidia has generally had good quality drivers.

Intel- support is all over the place. Mostly decent, though sometimes horrible. Some documentaion released. VAAPI is almost pointless on Intel vdieo chips, even the newest versions. The actual video hardware is a best lackluster. Generally OK drivers.

So we've got the choice between a two GPU companies (AMD/ATI and nVidia), oen that it open soruce friendly but has driver issues, the other open source unfriendly but has less driver issues. There is also one greedy pig (intel). OK, before anyone gets bothered by 'greedy pig', how much intrest did intel have in video before 3DFX started charging $300 for voodoo accelerator cards? Virtually none.

So we have the choice of Curly, Moe or Larry.

Though there is also matrox. Last I saw a G550 was still over $100.....which is far too much for a slightly updated video chip from 1999. If Parhelia hadnt 'failed' matrox might have a more current GPU out, but since that failed matrox has pretty much pulled back and let AMD/ATI, nVidia and intel get even more market share. Its a pity, really, as matrox had great image quality. Comon, matrox, make some basic GPU hardware which is 'primitave' enought that you can release full documentation without worring that some other manufacturer wont extroplate and 'steal' the tech serects from the soruce code. Keep some of the chips to sell in matrox branded cards (eg more expensive than others, but known good quality) and sell some chips to the other big manufacturers to gain a bit more market share.

You know whats almost funny? When AMD bought out ATI then rebranded ATI to AMD, I said at the time that it could be a bad move- problems with the AMD GPUs could bleed over to affet the AMD CPU 'brand'.

AMD hasn't had the performance crown for a while. From late P3 up to Core2Duo, AMD was in front or even with intel. It was an amazing run....due to the way the industry reacted, and some thanks to 'dirty tricks' intel kept its majority market share. If AMD had of got up to 40-50% of market share in betwen 2002-2008 they migh have had a chance to keep up with intel. At %10-20, not a chance. Intel has more fabs, more engineers, more conenctions in industry, its the 800lb gorilla in the X86 room.

Bulldozer isnt that bad. People were expecting some i7 sandy bridge beating monster, and that didnt happen (and IMO couldnt happen). But in its price range, its OK.

Prices are as comptitive as AMD can make them, really. Intel is pushing hard to lower AMDs market share as much as possible, and they would love to knock AMD out of the market, if only so they can push prices back up to where intel wants them. IMO that wouldnt help intel long term, as high prices will just speed up the move to ARM based CPUs that is already starting.

While you arent the only one to bring it up caravel, you had the most complete and interesing post so I used yours. ;)

I should have updated this thread, but I forgot it. It seems that after the outcry in the community for dropping "legacy" hardware (it is clear that this is not legacy hardware, the HD4000 line is still the top of the line integrated GPU for chipsets for Bulldozer CPUs) AMD realized what they have done and started a legacy driver line. Not long ago they released a beta for their 12.6 Legacy driver which works with kernels up to 3.4 and X.Org server 1.12 (back to Slackware -current on my "legacy" laptop). This driver also lacks the serious bug the mainline 64 bit 12.6 driver has. But it is not very likely that this driver will ever get updates to run on newer kernels or X.Org versions.

From my opinion, the problems that AMD has are not cause by bad hardware. All their products run pretty fine for me.
It is that they have made some serious mistakes in their marketing and their release policy. At first, dropping the support for legacy cards with 12.6 was a really bad move, if they simply had waited with this til 12.6 was released and all cards had support for newer kernels and X.Org the negative press wouldn't have been so much. Now they not only dropped support for older cards but also changed the release model for their drivers, in order to achieve higher quality drivers (and of course to save money). This is normally a good thing, they released beta drivers to the public, so that people can test the drivers and find bugs. Many people accepted this and reported bugs, between them one serious bug (not really a bug but an insane programming failure) that made the driver for many debian (and derivatives) users unusable. Instead of fixing this bug they decided to release the driver anyways. Hell, Debian is a niche distro anyways, used by only a few people, so we don't have to care. That seems at least to be what they were thinking.
After they had already such a negative press about their drivers they decided to release a buggy driver after switching to a development model that should improve quality. Yeah, they seem to have some masterminds in their marketing department.
May be the same masterminds that decided that it is totally good to market the AMD FX8000 series as the worlds first real 8-core desktop CPU. Besides the fact that they aren't real 8-cores and can't compete with the only competitors 4-core CPUs. So now we have AMD 8-cores that can't compete with Intel 4-cores. Brilliant. If they had marketed them as quad cores with extended SMT then we would have AMD 4-cores that are not as performant as Intel's 4-cores. Sounds totally better to me than 8-cores that can't compete with 4-cores.

But anyways, after Nvidia has lost a multi-million dollar deal in China due to not having the willingness to port their drivers to the MIPS architecture (or release open drivers) and since AMD got the deal, I hope that both companies now realized that Linux users are not second class anymore and that the linux market will be very important for them in the future, with fast growing markets in Asia.
We can all only hope that this will give us better drivers (open and proprietary).

P.S.: If you want to try the 12.6 Legacy beta, AMD somehow thought it would be a good idea to reward their beta testers. With an annoying watermark on the screen. Another good decision from them: Hey, they do the testing for us, let's annoy them.
Anyways, if you want to get rid of the watermark launch this command:Thanks to Kano, developer of the Kanotix distribution for that.
It is also possible to activate support for hardware decoding of H264 Level 5.1 material, but this may still be buggy, so do it on your own risk:Rather funny that one has to activate this manually because one of the reasons for dropping driver support for the "legacy" hardware was feature-completeness.

Why would they have to? Linux has a fairly tiny desktop user base, and putting people to work writing full-function drivers for perhaps a few dozen users who happen to have a particular printer doesn't make economic sense...not to mention the fact that Linux is constantly changing and there are hundreds of distros in use, so testing and compatibility are a nightmare. Windows and MacOS have consistent hardware interfaces and APIs, Linux doesn't. You're simply never going to have the kind of support that Windows or Mac will. Threatening "not to buy it" is not really the answer, there aren't enough potential lost sales to matter.

Not competitive? They are more than competitive. You'd better hope AMD never fails, or your beloved Intel processors will double in price. There's no reason to keep prices down when there's no competition.

Newegg prices:

AMD FX-4170 Zambezi 4.2GHz (4.3GHz Turbo) Socket AM3+ 125W Quad-Core Desktop Processor FD4170FRGUBOX $139

Intel Core i7-3770S Ivy Bridge 3.1GHz (3.9GHz Turbo) LGA 1155 65W Quad-Core Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics 4000 BX80637I73770S $319

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AMD FX-8150 Zambezi 3.6GHz Socket AM3+ 125W Eight-Core Desktop Processor FD8150FRGUBOX $199

Intel Core i7-3930K Sandy Bridge-E 3.2GHz (3.8GHz Turbo) LGA 2011 130W Six-Core Desktop Processor BX80619i73930K $569

Now not only compare prices, but also benchmarks. The Intel CPUs you have chosen run circles around the AMDs.

What are we talking about here? Intel has about 40% more average performance for about 300% the price? I'm not saying Intel chips aren't work the higher price tag, but they can be a bit overpriced. I've heard Intel likes to make a 60% profit on their products. This is why Intel is leaving the SSD market, too many competitors to keep the high price tags for their profits.

Yes, Intel can be a bit overpriced, but it was always the case that more performance means exponentially more Dollars. If you want to compare the price/performance ratio of CPUs you usually don't take one expensive high-end CPU and compare it with a cheaper mid-range CPU from another vendor, you take two CPUs in the same price range and compare the performance. So let's compare this on a real basis.
We take two CPUs from AMD and two CPUs from Intel and comapre them:

Let's go for the 100€ line first, we can take the AMD FX4100 for that and the Intel Core i3 2100.
As we can see here, gaming performance is basically the same, sometimes the AMD is a little bit slower: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...mark,3136.html
This site ranks the the FX4100 a bit higher than the i3 2100: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_look...4100+Quad-Core

I conclude, in this price region there is no advantage for any of the competitors when it comes to price/performance. There is a marketing advantage for Intel, nonetheless, their dual-core CPU is as fast as AMD's CPU, that is marketed as quad-core (but we know better).

Now let us take the 200€ line, we take the AMD FX8150 and the Intel Core i5-2500K or the i5-3550. Now lets search for Benchmarks:
The Passmark benchmark seems to run better again on the AMD hardware: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_look...50+%40+3.30GHz
This benchmark shows a more balanced picture: http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/artic...-Review/1402/1

So again, no real difference in price/performance, but again a marketing advantage for Intel, their 4-cores are as fast as AMD's 8-core.

So the my conclusion is: The previous image of AMD having a better price/performance ratio is nowadays not true anymore, when it comes to marketed-cores/performance ratio Intel is 100% better (which basically can only mean AMD's marketing sucks) and when it comes to the absolute top performance it is a fact that Intel is unbeatable, of course for higher prices.

Bulldozer is marketed as an 8-core, but it's similar to Intel's i7 with multi-threading. Basically integer cores sharing FPU cores. It's just the way each chip does this is different. AMD with Clustered Multi-Threading, and Intel with Simultaneous Multi-Threading. The operating system will see both chips as 8-core processors. It's just bad for AMD when people see their "8-core" can't keep up with Intel's "4-core".

Most of the comparisons I see from both brands aren't usually based on price at first, but usually flagship vs flagship, which Intel is way ahead on, both in performance and power consumption. Just comes down to what are people willing to pay when it comes to price vs performance.