[dundee] Graphics cards, Firefox and Thunderbird.

[Andrew Clayton]

On Thu, 20 Mar 2014 01:36:40 +0000, Owen Bowers Adams wrote:

> This is quite likely a misunderstanding on my part, but are AMD/ATI
> any better in this regard ? You've got the
> Catalyst driver, which is a binary blob. Then you've got the radeon
> driver..which loads propietary microcode in the
> form of smaller binary blobs.

Possibly, but that would be firmware running on the graphics hardware
not a big chuck of unknown code running in the kernel.

There are many bits of hardware of that have open source drivers (the
kernel part) but which load some firmware into the hardware
itself (take a look under /lib/firmware), these are really two different
issues.

> On the Nvidia front you' have the official driver which is a giant
> binary blob, or you've got nouveau. Which while it's
> not an Nvidia project, doesn't load in any proprietary code and has
> had Nvidia contributions.

Though last time I looked  nouveau was still a ways off being
comparable o the Intel/Radeon drivers.

> Neither companies exactly a bastion of FOSS. Both have their
> drawbacks. I'm really not trying to champion Nvidia.
> On a personal level I think it genuinely depends on the use case and
> AMD has an extremely strong offering. I just
> dislike the blanket statement that AMD are better because of their
> sort of open but not really approach.

Err, the Radeon driver is not really an ATI/AMD thing, it existed long
before they started releasing docs and the radeonhd driver which was
largely a Novell/AMD cooperation but didn't really gain any traction
anyway.

For a long time the Radeon 9200 was the go to card for open source
OpenGL support. This had nothing to do with ATI being good OSS
citizens. IIRC it was due to the weather channel paying to have open
source drivers done for the r100/200 cards probably done through
information gained via NDA's.

Before that it was Matrox G200/400's there was also the utah-glx
project that could work on some nvidia cards, this is all early 2000's

Fortunately things have improved greatly since, Intel kicked things off
with specs and drivers for their cards hiring from within the community
and then AMD followed suit.

> To reiterate though, I can't guarantee my knowledge on the situation
> is up to date and would genuinely welcome any
> corrections to the above.

Likewise, some of the above might not be entirely 100% but I think it's
basically there.

Andrew