On Fri, 5 Dec 2003, Gene C. wrote: >> The only alternative is to just >> not add any new support for hardware until we physically have it >> to test with. That is a bad idea though, as the majority of new >> hardware support that gets added works well, even if we don't >> have the hardware. > >With all of the variations of both built by ATI and powered by >ATI adapters, I consider it a loosing struggle to expect to have >every variation in house. In general however, we don't need to. When ATI first allowed 3rd parties to make boards based on their chips, the existing XFree86 release at the time had many hard coded assumptions about the memory type and speed used on a given ATI board, and other assumptions in the Radeon driver. There were also assumptions about how multiple displays were wired up to the chip, and as long as people had Built by ATI hardware, the drivers always worked, because that is what was used to write the driver. However, once Powered by ATI boards became available, and 3rd parties changed the way the various chips were wired on the board, or changed memory speeds/type, or other things, the assumptions in the drivers did not hold true anymore in some cases and people would have failures. The next XFree86 release (4.3.0) changed all of that, by genericizing those parts of the driver to un-hardcode the Built by ATI assumptions. I don't remember the last time I saw a bug reported against Radeon which was "Powered by ATI" card specific, and I consider all Built/Powered boards to more or less have equal quality support currently. If someone reports a problem, it is much less likely to be specific to one or the other nowadays. If I try to reproduce it on my Built by card(s) and can not, and someone happens to have a Powered by card, it is possible there is a difference that is causing the problem, but I would be much more inclined to assume it is some other problem that has nothing to do with wether it was Built by or Powered by ATI. That has been my experience so far with 4.3.0 anyway. Most of the PCI based Radeon cards nowadays tend to be Powered by ATI boards however, and so some people might have problems with them and assume it is because it is "Powered by", when in actuality it is because it is "PCI" instead of "AGP", and PCI Radeon support is experimental only (although it is getting much more solid as of late). >IMHO, this is one of those situations where you will need to >depend on the community to report the info on new adapters. That is always appreciated of course. I generally ask ATI directly though and get a list back within a day or so. I missed a few when updating the lists last, but that is quite easy to do since it requires making rather tedious updates in about 5 different locations, some in XFree86 source code, some in our hwdata, and then again on the official pci ID database on sourceforge, etc. I'll fix that sometime, but until then people can use the ChipID keyword to work around it easily enough, so it's not a mission critical priority currently, but I'll eventually get around to it during FC2 development, and probably release an update for FC1 also. >Please ask if there is insufficent data in my bugzilla reports. Will do. -- Mike A. Harris _______________________________________________ xfree86-list mailing list xfree86-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/xfree86-list IRC: #xfree86 on irc.redhat.com
