[Pkg-fglrx-devel] fglrx-driver dropped from unstable question

[Jonas Andradas]

Hello,

In order to ask my question I will explain first the motives that lead to
it, so please bear with me, or just jump to "THE QUESTION" below :)

I have seen that on May 14th the fglrx-driver has been dropped from
unstable, and in the removals file [1] the reason given is:  "ROM; EOL,
does not fit Debian and superseded by amdgpu"

[1] https://ftp-master.debian.org/removals.txt

I would love to be wrong, but from what I have read and seen in some
colleagues computers/laptops, the opensource driver (as much as I would
love to use it) does not take advantage the full potential of the GPU in
that it only seems to have 2d acceleration (with no or very limited 3D
acceleration), and from a computational point of view some
applications/programs such as oclhashcat are not able to make the GPU work
in the way it would be expected (I don't know if this would be, for
example, oclhashcat's fault in that it expects the proprietary driver, or
the free driver's fault in that it does not (as of yet) fully expose the
capabilities of the GPU).

The fglrx-driver packages that were in unstable, as far as I know and tried
(I mean, in my experience), were not truly usable in a "sid-based" Debian,
since upgrading to sid would also upgrade the xserver-xorg packages, and
the latest Xorg version does not provide any of the xorg-video-abi-xx that
fglrx-driver depends on.  As far as I can tell, this is an inconsistency
between the upstream ATI/AMD driver and the Xorg release, not something
Debian-specific.

So, finally, I arrive to THE QUESTION I wanted to ask, which is whether
dropping the fglrx-drivers is a definitive decision from the Fglrx
packaging team, or whether when (and if) AMD releases new drivers for Linux
with less problems, and especially while the free drivers are not a viable
alternative to fully take advantage of the GPU capabilities, these new
drivers would get packaged again as fglrx-driver.

I do use the GPU and would love to harness all it has to offer (I did not
get to choose whether the laptop came with nVidia or ATI/AMD), so while I
am using the current fglrx-drivers in stable I would like to know what
could I reasonably expect in the future.

Thank you very much in advance,

-- 
Jonás Andradas
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