Fglrx

Infobox Software
name = fglrx



caption =
developer = Advanced Micro Devices
latest_release_version = Catalyst 8.9
latest_release_date = September 17, 2008
operating_system = Linux
genre = Device driver
license = Proprietary
website = [http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html ati.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 four weeks.

New Driver Architecture

On 2007-09-05 AMD announced ( [http://online.wsj.com/public/article/PR-CO-20070905-900010-UcljXlmQ_5xmu2TQVRZ3E6lY3Sg_20070905.html?mod=wsjcrmain 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 [http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=10955 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 [http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7#c24 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. [http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/30/197259 A Look at the State of ATI Linux Drivers (2005)] , [http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/20/1433230 The State of ATI Drivers on GNU/Linux (2006)] , [http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/04/1532215 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. [http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NjA0Ng] This driver is named radeonhd. The first stable version was released as version 1.0.0 on November 30th, 2007.( [http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=931&num=1 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 ( [http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NjE4Ng status report] ).

Before AMD released 2D specifications for its graphics card family, there was a free and open source software project named Avivo ( [http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=753&num=1 more info] ), which aimed to support Radeon R520 chipsets through reverse-engineering.

ee also

*Graphics hardware and FOSS

External links

* [http://wiki.cchtml.com/ Unofficial Linux ATI Wiki]
* [http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Fglrx The Fglrx page on the Thinkpad wiki]
* [http://debian.wgdd.de/temp/fglrx_man/fglrx.4x.html fglrx options use in X configuration files (x*.conf)] . This is a manpage created from public records and is available [http://cvs.wgdd.de/cgi-bin/cvsweb/fglrx_man here] via cvs.
* [http://www.radeonhd.org/ radeonhd.org] radeonhd.org contains development information about radeonhd.
* [http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/ R520 Card specifications] released to public by AMD.
* [http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/rms-ati-protest.html Protest against ATI nearly led to the arrest of RMS ] .