Penguin Fury: ATI
Contributed by Luis M on Wednesday June 15, 2005 03:56AM
from the switching-to-ATI-and-patching-hell dept. (3665)
Well, it seems that switching to ATI has been one of the worse things I have done. Not only their Linux support sucks, but, their drivers come out without necessarily anticipating or taking into consideration the changes in the Linux kernel. It turns out the the just released (a few days old) ATI driver still can't compile correctly against the soon-to-be-released 2.6.12 kernel. At the present time this kernel is at revision rc6! That means that any day there will be a stable 2.6.12 kernel, yet, ATI tested their drivers only with kernel 2.6.10 or so and didn't even look/peek into what would happen when 2.6.12 got released. Is the schedule too tight to release drivers? I don't think so. The last release before this one was at least 2 months old! Any other company (nvidia?) would've at least include try to anticipate this: 1. get the freely available kernel sources for the next new stable release 2. add some #pragmas to the code to make it at least compile with the future stable kernel without sacrificing stability with the targetted kernel 3. add a nice release note in a README file so that people know that even though the kernel compiles fine in newer kernels, it's meant/tested to work with kernel version 2.6.x whatever that x represents.
NOTE: this patch was mostly a few sed 's///' replacements with ideas from http://ati.cchtml.com/
[updated 2005-07-10 23:28 UTC] Remember that for Debian (Sarge) when you download and alien/convert the .rpm for ATI you need to run "dpkg-divert --package fglrx-4-3-0 --add --rename --divert /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.so.1.2.diverted /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.so.1.2 " to create a diversion for the drivers for the XFree86 4.3.x server (for Xorg you need to use fglrx-6-8-0). Now that the 2.6.12 kernel has been officially release, I went back to the cchtml patch.
[updated 2005-08-26 05:28 UTC] It turns out that ATI releases their drivers every 2 months at around the middle of the month. Removed the patch since it's no longer needed.
