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fglrx

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fglrx
Developer(s)Advanced Micro Devices
Stable release
Catalyst 8.10 / October 15, 2008
Operating systemLinux
TypeDevice driver
LicenseProprietary
Websiteati.amd.com

fglrx is the name of the Linux display driver used for ATI Radeon and ATI FireGL family video adapters and stands for "FireGL and Radeon for X". It contains free open source as well as proprietary and closed source parts. For proper Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) support, the kernel source code for the currently running kernel must be installed and compiled. The driver can work without the kernel module, but DRI will not be available.

Versions

Versions exist for XFree86 and X.Org for both x86 and x86-64 systems. ATI releases a new version approximately every month.

Version and Release Notes Release Date Brief Change Log
Catalyst 8.10 15 October, 2008 Several bugfixes.
Catalyst 8.9 17 September, 2008 Support for Red Flag DT6SP1, OpenSUSE 11.
Catalyst 8.8 20 August, 2008 Support for CrossFireX, adaptive antialiasing, overclocking, MultiView.
Catalyst 8.7 21 July, 2008 Support for Ubuntu 8.04 xorg 7.3 (not 8.10 with xorg 7.4), OpenSUSE 11, Red Flag DT 7.0.
Catalyst 8.6 18 June, 2008 UYVY and YUY2 pixel format support for interleaved stream video playback. Radeon HD 4850/4870 support (not listed in release notes due to timing of product introduction).
Catalyst 8.5 21 May, 2008 Catalyst A.I., improved 2D performance, DKMS support in installer, Linux 2.6.25 kernel support.
Catalyst 8.4 16 April, 2008 "Early look" support for Ubuntu 8.04 ("Hardy Heron"). XVideo extension and VESA frambuffer black screen bug fixes. Packaging script updates.
Catalyst 8.3 5 March, 2008 X-Video support for the Xpress 1200. Blocky video and diagonal tearing no longer occurs when using X-Video. Fixes problems with screen resolutions not integer multiples of 64 pixels. Image brightness issues resolved.
Catalyst 8.2 13 February, 2008 Changing screen resolution in a horizontal or vertical desktop setup without DDC no longer crashes, the Xserver no longer freezes on shutdown if atieventsd is running, the first OpenGL application run after starting a session on Xserver version 1.4 no longer hangs.
Catalyst 8.1 18 January, 2008 Repaired screen corruption after a longer time period, custom mode lines in xorg.conf will no longer be ignored by the fglrx driver, suspending to RAM or DISK on kernel version 2.6.23 or later no longer fails.
Catalyst 7.12 20 December, 2007 Add FireGL support. OpenGL memory leak fixed.
Catalyst 7.11 21 November, 2007 early-look support for new operating systems.
8.42.3 23 October, 2007 AIGLX support, Xserver 1.4 support.
8.41.7 12 September, 2007 HD 2xxx (R600) and new driver codebase.
8.40.4 13 August, 2007 TV Out Functionality and Catalyst Control Center Linux Edition features are introduced.
8.39.4 23 July, 2007 The kernel module build no longer fails on kernel version 2.6.22.
8.38.7 28 June, 2007 Hotfix for segmentation fault when using aticonfig --initial
8.38.6 25 June, 2007 support for RHEL5 and fixes the moving a video window between two monitors in a big desktop configuration and playing multiple videos at the same time with textured video issues.
8.37.6 31 May, 2007 the Catalyst Control Center version 1.0 and resolved few issues.
8.36.5 18 April, 2007 support for the latest Linux Kernel, 2.6.20.
8.35.5 28 March, 2007 Beta version of the 'AMD Catalyst Control Centre: Linux Edition' to replace the FireGL Control panel
8.34.8 21 February, 2007 support for ATI Xpress 1250 IGP and fixes the XVideo Extension loading segfault on X1K cards and x86-64 server.
8.33.6 10 January, 2007 support for X.Org 7.2 and Linux Kernel 2.6.19.
8.32.5 13 December, 2006 support for the ATI Radeon X1650 Support and X.Org 7.2 RC2.
8.31.5 15 November, 2006
8.30.3 31 October, 2006
8.29.6 20 September, 2006 support for the latest Linux kernel, 2.6.18. Version 8.29.6 ends support for Radeon R200 based cards (i.e., the series of Radeon 8500 through 9250).
8.28.8 18 August, 2006 support for ATI Radeon Xpress 1200, 1250 and 1300 models and allows IBM/Lenovo, ThinkPads to switch the active display devices using the Fn+F7 hotkey. ATI now publish a unified installer which detects the host architecture (x86 or amd64) and installs the appropriate packages. The driver now remembers which display devices were activated across restarts, rather than unilaterally enabling all attached displays. Some problems with XVideo have been identified with this release. For more information see the
8.27.10 27 July, 2006 support for X.Org 7.1 as well as Fedora Core. Issues relating to OpenGL with Java2D and launching XGL on display :0 have been fixed. However, TV Out is still unsupported on Radeon X1x00 cards and the OpenGL issues with Radeon 9000 appear to be unresolved.
8.26.18 26 June, 2006 mostly concerned with minor bug fixes. However, it does include an events daemon which allows hotplugging of Digital Flat Panels and thermal throttling of the GPU through daemon events to prevent overheating.
8.25.18 24 May, 2006 support for FireGL V7350, V7300, V7200, V5200, V3400, V3350 & V2200 and enables DPMS support by default. X.Org 7.0 is now supported by the installer. At least eleven issues have been resolved with this release.
8.24.8 18 April, 2006 support for X.Org 7.0 and kernel 2.6.16. According to the driver now supports the Radeon X1300/X1600/X1800/X1900 (including Mobility versions of these) as well as adding accelerated video support on Avivo cards.

New Driver Architecture

On 2007-09-05 AMD announced (press release) their new Linux driver architecture that included Radeon HD 2000 R600 support, AIGLX, and performance improvements. Phoronix had delivered coverage of this announcement in an AMD 8.41 Display Driver Preview and other articles. The performance improvements were noted as upwards of 90% faster than the previous driver.

Criticism

AMD/ATI Linux support has been heavily criticized over the last number of years. From stability issues to lack of AIGLX support (support added in v. 8.42.3) and lack of options AMD/ATI proprietary drivers have not been received well. Furthermore, 2D benchmarks show that ATI cards using these drivers are two orders of magnitude slower than the competing NVIDIA cards in basic tasks.

In fact, the responses to Slashdot articles over the last number of years demonstrate the severity of the problem. A Look at the State of ATI Linux Drivers (2005), The State of ATI Drivers on GNU/Linux (2006), Insight Into AMD's Linux Driver Development (2007)

Alternatives

Most cards will work, without acceleration and with reduced display resolution, using the vesa driver. The free and open source radeon, r128 and atimisc drivers (available in the xserver-xorg-video-ati package in Debian) provide 3D acceleration. Unfortunately, these drivers only work in chipsets r1xx, r20xx, r3xx, and r4xx — that is, from the original Radeon through to the Radeon X1050, inclusive. Support for r5xx/r6xx has been announced and is currently under development.

Concurrent with the released specifications AMD announced it had hired Novell, the developers of openSUSE, to develop a free and open-source X11 driver using the specifications.[1] This driver is named radeonhd. The first stable version was released as version 1.0.0 on November 30th, 2007.(radeonhd 1.0.0) Radeonhd development is limited to modesetting until more specifications are released by AMD, but does support dual-head setups. The development process towards 3D support is expected to be slow (status report).

Before AMD released 2D specifications for its graphics card family, there was a free and open source software project named Avivo (more info), which aimed to support Radeon R520 chipsets through reverse-engineering.

See also

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