[Pkg-fglrx-devel] fglrx [non-free] status for wheezy

[Andreas Beckmann]

Dear Release Managers,

the status of the non-free fglrx driver does not look too good at the
moment: fglrx-driver is not in wheezy (it was removed in favor of Xorg
Xserver 1.12). Current Xorg is now supported, but the package is
RC-buggy on amd64, requiring a new upstream release to fix (which has
not yet happened).

AMD took a very long time to release a driver (Catalyst 12-6, released
end of June) that finally supports Xserver 1.12. At the same time they
changed their release model and removed support for all graphics cards
before the Radeon HD 5000 series. Unfortunately this driver is broken on
amd64 where it causes X to crash during startup (#675940), so this
currently won't migrate to testing. We hope this will be fixed in the
next release, but it's unclear when that will arrive.

Patrick has got the information, that there may be a point release for
Debian this month, which will just fix the regression on amd64, but it
is not for 100% sure if it really will happen. So we already look
forward for other solutions.

Surprisingly last week a beta legacy driver was published that supports
the previously removed Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series (but nothing
newer) and adds support for Xserver 1.12 (without being buggy on amd64).
Preliminary tests have been promising :-)

I've been working on packaging this legacy driver (ITP #680654), it's
nearly ready for NEW. This will be similar to the current fglrx-driver
packages, just with s/fglrx/fglrx-legacy/. There will be Conflicts
between the fglrx packages and their fglrx-legacy counterparts because
they ship the same file names.
There is one package in fglrx-driver that needs a rename to be
compatible with this setup: libxvbaw1 -> libfglrx-amdxvba1.

Before proceeding with uploading these changes I have two questions:

* can we expect a freeze exception for fglrx-legacy-driver
  - a new source package, but based on fglrx-driver)?

* can we expect a freeze exception for fglrx-driver
  - for a new upstream release
  - a single binary package rename
  (compared to what is currently in sid and has an automatic freeze
exception, but is RC buggy) -- only in case a new upstream release
actually arrives in time and fixes the RC bug?

Otherwise there won't be any proprietary fglrx driver along with wheezy
- which would be the first release without fglrx.

So in the best case we could have both fglrx-driver and
fglrx-legacy-driver in wheezy, which support the old hardware that was
supported in squeeze and the current hardware, too.

Note that these are leaf packages in non-free, so they are not going to
break or block any other packages but themselves.


Regards,

Andreas