freebsd stable - Mar 2007 - Don't buy AMD products (was Re: Xorg and ATI card query.)

We need to start hounding on AMD to publish the developer
documentation for all radeon chipsets. I for one will not buy any AMD
or ATI components until they decide to fix the problem.

Here's the email address of AMD's president: dirk.meyer@amd.com

Give him your two cents.



On 3/12/07, Daniel O'Connor <doconnor@gsoft.com.au>
wrote:
> On Tuesday 13 March 2007 05:10, Yann Golanski wrote:
> > I have an ATI Radeon X1950 Sapphire and I am trying to get X/FreeBSD
> > working with it.  My system is a clean install of FreBSD.   I've
managed to
> > get VESA to "work" but cannot get much more than that.
>
> There is no open source support for this card (alas). It's VESA or
fglrx.
>

On Tue, Mar 13, 2007 at 02:58:34PM -0500, Nikolas Britton
wrote:
> We need to start hounding on AMD to publish the developer
> documentation for all radeon chipsets. I for one will not buy any AMD
> or ATI components until they decide to fix the problem.
> 
> Here's the email address of AMD's president: dirk.meyer@amd.com
> 
> Give him your two cents.
Boycotting their hardware due to lack-of public developer docs is
extreme but justified.  Everyone has the right to do that if they
desire.

But in my opinion, mailing the president of AMD is really not the way to
go about this.  That methodology invites angry people sending him
flames, which does nothing but destroy the image of a mature, reliable
open-source community.

Besides, chances are it's not Meyer who's making these decisions (re:
proprietary hardware / NDA-only documentation), but a few select
individuals at ATI who are fuelled off of paranoia (the most common
defence being fear nVidia/other competitors will "steal their
technology").  Really sounds like the decision of a legal dept. and not
a CEO.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                 jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                        http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                   Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.               PGP: 4BD6C0CB |

Please be very careful. The only real alternative (Intel comes and
goes) is Nvidia whose driver is binary-only for i386 (no amd64
support) and has a history for being notoriously buggy. I only buy ATI
because of the problems I keep seeing people have with the Nvidia
driver. I have a friend who has basically abandoned his dual-head
Nvidia card due to recurring issues.


                        -Kip

On 3/13/07, Nikolas Britton <nikolas.britton@gmail.com>
wrote:
> We need to start hounding on AMD to publish the developer
> documentation for all radeon chipsets. I for one will not buy any AMD
> or ATI components until they decide to fix the problem.
>
> Here's the email address of AMD's president: dirk.meyer@amd.com
>
> Give him your two cents.
>
>
>
> On 3/12/07, Daniel O'Connor <doconnor@gsoft.com.au> wrote:
> > On Tuesday 13 March 2007 05:10, Yann Golanski wrote:
> > > I have an ATI Radeon X1950 Sapphire and I am trying to get
X/FreeBSD
> > > working with it.  My system is a clean install of FreBSD.  
I've managed to
> > > get VESA to "work" but cannot get much more than that.
> >
> > There is no open source support for this card (alas). It's VESA or
fglrx.
> >
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to
"freebsd-stable-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"
>

On 3/13/07, Nikolas Britton <nikolas.britton@gmail.com>
wrote:
> We need to start hounding on AMD to publish the developer
> documentation for all radeon chipsets. I for one will not buy any AMD
> or ATI components until they decide to fix the problem.
>
> Here's the email address of AMD's president: dirk.meyer@amd.com
>
> Give him your two cents.
>
>
>
> On 3/12/07, Daniel O'Connor <doconnor@gsoft.com.au> wrote:
> > On Tuesday 13 March 2007 05:10, Yann Golanski wrote:
> > > I have an ATI Radeon X1950 Sapphire and I am trying to get
X/FreeBSD
> > > working with it.  My system is a clean install of FreBSD.  
I've managed to
> > > get VESA to "work" but cannot get much more than that.
> >
> > There is no open source support for this card (alas). It's VESA or
fglrx.
> >
Since AMD/ATI doesn't make a native driver for FreeBSD, I only buy
notebooks with nvidia, and I told my friends about this.
We as FreeBSD users could write about this in our blogs and pages,
which will widespread the word about the driver issues in better way,
as long as more users aware of this, this will force AMD/ATI to look
into the issue deeper, and work it out.

This would be better than emailing the AMD CEO IMHO.

-- 
Regards,

-Abdullah Ibn Hamad Al-Marri
Arab Portal
http://www.WeArab.Net/

Quoth Nikolas Britton on Tue, Mar 13, 2007 at 14:58:34
-0500
> We need to start hounding on AMD to publish the developer
> documentation for all radeon chipsets. I for one will not buy any AMD
> or ATI components until they decide to fix the problem.
It is not a problem but a marketing decision we know nothing about.  I
have seen Linux drivers, Windows drivers and Mac drivers from their
site.  I am sure that if we asked in a reasonable and polite fashion we
could convince them to release the drivers for *BSD -- or make the Linux
ones in such a way that they work on *BSD.  

Hounding them is not going to help.  It will harm our cause.
> Give him your two cents.
Please, do not do that.  It will hinder.

-- 
yann@kierun.org                  -=*=-                      www.kierun.org
    PGP:   009D 7287 C4A7 FD4F 1680  06E4 F751 7006 9DE2 6318
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Andrew Reilly wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Mar 2007 14:17:00 -0800 (PST)
> Doug Ambrisko <ambrisko@ambrisko.com> wrote:
>   
>> One thing that is a plus with nv is that X has some support for it,
>> whereas, the newer ati cards have no support :-(  I was a fan of ati 
>> since it was easier to get support.  Now I'm starting to lean
towards
>> Nvidia :-(
>>     
>
> Does anyone know if there are *any* contemporary graphics cards
> that have 3D acceleration supported by some flavour of
> open-source x.org?  Doesn't have to be a super-fast 'leet gamer
> system to be better than a non-accelerated frame buffer.
>
> Matrox used to have a reputation for goodness (I used to have a
> G400 or the like), but it's been a long time...
>
> (I'm currently using a lowish-end NVidia card under the x.org nv
> driver, but it has issues (of which no 3D accel is but one...)
>
> Cheers,
>
>   
Try the 'vesa' xorg driver. It may not be fancy or all that accelerated 
but it works quite well. I have an nvidia card and cannot get it to work 
for the life of me. the drive attached, but nothing happens after that. 
It might be the fact that I have a PCI express card. But the vesa driver 
is working just fine for me.

> We need to start hounding on AMD to publish the developer
> documentation for all radeon chipsets. I for one will not buy any AMD
> or ATI components until they decide to fix the problem.
>
> Here's the email address of AMD's president: dirk.meyer@amd.com
>
> Give him your two cents.
>
already did, i use AMD Athlon64 processors, but none of it's graphics 
cards

On Tue, 13 Mar 2007 14:58:34 -0500
"Nikolas Britton" wrote:
> We need to start hounding on AMD to publish the developer
> documentation for all radeon chipsets. I for one will not buy any AMD
> or ATI components until they decide to fix the problem.
Brilliant.  Let's destroy years of good will with AMD, a company that has
been very good about supporting open source and providing good documentation
for their products.

Let's hound them about something that is probably not under their control,
since they don't own all of the "IP" in the ATI products, just as
nVidia
doesn't own everything it sells.

This is the kind of thing that turns people and companies away from open
source.
> Here's the email address of AMD's president: <deleted>
Quite acting like a child.  Would you like it if someone posted your email
address publicly like this to be harvested for spam and useless zealotry?



-- 
shannon           | There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not
                  | philosophers.