[davinci]

Q: Will ATi offer plain tar.gz/tar.bz2 package of the fglrx driver, if no why not?

A: No. Because there are fundamental issues with providing tarballs. We are however working on our installer that will simplify things for a lot of people. In general, the distribution's packages are preferred for distributions that not directly supported by ATI. (SuSE/Debian/FC/Gentoo all have packages)


Q: Reading dissusions on the x.org mailing lists it seems X is heading in an OpenGL based direction with an Xgl implementation. Does ATI have any plans to support this?

A: As said in the response to composite extension Q. There are some fundamental technology issues that need to be solved before that becomes widely available. When Xgl becomes deployed and relevant, we will move in that direction.


Q: Any plans for BSD support?

A: At this stage: no.


Q: Does ATI plan to increase the resources it allows to the Linux developement or are they satisfied with the pace they have established so far?

A: As market demand increases, the team will increase. In the last 12 months, demand _HAS_ increased, and hence the resource count has increased.


Q: Close to a year ago, Ati made an announcement they would be relocating their driver development to Canada as a means of increasing the productivity of their drivers, can you explain to us what benefits we, the end users, would notice as a result of this move?

A: ATI _never_ made an official announcement of the move. But the driver development did move from Starnberg to Canada. The initial benefit is that I have a job. (Matt's attempt at humour) The initial benefit is that the drivers are now released on a regular canter (every two months). We use the same codebase at the time of release - CAT 4.11 windows drivers will have the same core code as the 8.08 Linux drivers. We have direct access to HW and SW engineers, to resolve problems faster. We have direct access to PR and Marketing. As you can (will) see, the next drivers have a few extra goodies, which is a direct result of the work.


Q: How concerned is ATI about the effect the quality of it's linux drivers has on it's good name? This considering a lot of linux enthousiasts serve as a guide for less-technical friends and family in their purchasing decisions? And in this light, did ATI ever consider temporarily boosting the develment resources to bring the drivers up to par on 3d performance?

A: You bet that we are both very concerned about anything that impacts the reputation of our software. As such we will now adopt a more open approach to keeping the user community update on our Linux developments, as we regularly update the press on our progress in the same manner we do with our windows drivers. In fact you will see more coverage on ATI's linux developments in the coming weeks at some of your favorite tech web sites and we will continue this trend moving forward. My response on the burst development. We are more interested in sustainable development than one-shot wonders, hence we want to ramp the team, but do it carefully.


Q: is there a chance flgrx will switch to using the open (xorg/sfree86) DDX (2d Driver) and continue with the closed 3d driver? THere are already quite a few bugs that still affect the flgrx driver taht have been fixed in the xorg ddx

A: No. There are proprietary extensions that we can not fold into the Xorg release.


Q: PPC Support? PPC is one of the primary platforms- especially with IBM pushing it. What support is planned for PowerPC on the binary drivers?

A: None at this stage.


Q: Will ATI setup a Bugzilla for all of us in the Open source community wanting to help crush bugs and give you huge amount of information on fixing the Linux Drivers to overtake the competition?

A: No. Our bug list will include issues other than end user problems. We will not seperate into two lists.


Q: Considering the fact the next release will be available for x86 aswell as x64, the amount of work to be done for each release will undoubtebly increase. will ATI employ additional resources for the x86x64 platform, or is this done with the same(sized) team?

A: As true customer demand increases, resourcing will increase.


Q: As a Linux users who is in market for new video hardware, why should i choose ATi and purchase a video card from you over nVidia?

A: Because as THE market leader in graphics, with award winning hardware across all product lines. We have tackled our Windows driver problems of the past head on and not only overcome those problems, we are now setting an unprecedented pace in Windows drivers. Innovations such as monthly releases, CCC, VPU recover, Smartgart, etc are all things we worked our a$$'S off to deliver and we vow that the same passion will go into our Linux drivers


Q: What are the issues in supporting ACPI sleep states? I understand that this is still under very heavy development but it seems that restoring video state is the main problem at the moment. Are the future drivers being overhauled to support ACPI sleep and suspend?

A: We are working on our Power Management infrastructure, but as was mentioned, it is still evolving under Linux. I can't say when it will be in a truly supportable state.


Q: When will running several X session be supported, if it will be supported at all?

A: It will be supported, but I don't have any firm dates.


Matt's Closing Words
If people really want to help us solve our problems. Work with each other to create a test case. If you can make the test case return 0 for return 1 for fail, then we can track it down easier. Post it through rage3d Linux/Drivers for the moment... Watch this space for more information in the coming months.