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

[Patrick Matthäi]

Am 19.05.2016 um 20:16 schrieb Jonas Andradas:
> Hello,
Hi
>
> 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 EOL, does not fit Debian and superseded by amdgpu"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).

With current Linux versions and the most up to date amdgpu driver it
looks much much better. When jessie releases amdgpu should have got a
good 3D acceleration.

>
> 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.
But sid and testing are the next versions of Debian and the situtation
has been changed. AMD is focused now on the amdgpu driver (it is
developed by AMD) instead of fglrx.
>
> 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 think no. It is "sporadic" working and I do not think that AMD will
address such issues in the future anymore. fglrx is nearly dead.
>
> 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.

Hopefully a very good working free driver :)

>
> Thank you very much in advance,
>
> -- 
> Jonás Andradas
>
>
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-- 
/*
Mit freundlichem Gruß / With kind regards,
 Patrick Matthäi
 GNU/Linux Debian Developer

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        patrick at linux-dev.org
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