AMD Radeon's Proprietary Driver vs OpenSource Driver

When it comes to creating a software driver which enables the proper communication between the actual hardware and the operating system, it's important that the programmers have the proper "knowledge" about the core foundation about the hardware.

This however does not consist (not necessarily) of how the chip or the hardware is designed into depths such as how close the transistors are aligned, what materials are being used to manufacture them, how the direct communication between transistors take place, etc. As far as I know, all the programmer needs to know to design a optimized software driver has nothing to be with the physical attributes but as long as they how to communicate with the BIOS of the hardware, that "maybe" enough.

That's because it's the BIOS that talks directly with its hardware and is sort of the gate keeper thus the job of the OS (or the driver in this instance) to speak with the BIOS and tell him the needs and the rest should be taken care of. So in that sense, the manufacture is, in a way, is somewhat "protected".

Hmm yeah, about that ...

As everyone would agree, Praise and Fame are two powerful substances that define most of our lives thus keeping "the" secret is a "must" in some situations otherwise you'll mean nothing to others. Because rather than revealing the truth, in a way, pretension has its power over us.

It helps to create a sense of a self, adds a "meaning" to ones life which ultimately motivates to "do something" with their lives. As Adam Smith had said: "In competition, individual ambition serves the common good.", a big equation that's trying to balance itself out, perhaps.

Image via: Deviantart...

However this is not a philosophy that I'm quite fond of yet the more I deal with the "world' the more apparent it is. In that sense I do have sympathy for me and others: such as the hardware manufactures in this instance.

Anyhow, let me come back to the story. Before and after AMD purchased ATI graphics the company refused to give advanced technical details into the hands of the software driver developers which would/should reveal some, not necessarily all but some of their secrets as mentioned in the 2nd paragraph.

This is also the case with other major GPU manufactures such as Nvidia and Intel (although Intel is a bit open but some of their GPU do have some "lacking" of serious documentations according to developers) who're also scared give certain information about their hardware "details". Anyhow concerning AMD, now we have main two versions of their GPU drivers.

One is the Proprietary driver (which was known as fglrx which was then re-named as "AMD Catalyst Linux") and the other is the opensource driver. They're both initiated and lead by AMD and today I was reading an interesting article on Phonoix concerning their performance comparison.

They've run some performance tests using the Phoronix Test Suite (a benchmark utility) below are few of the images containing the results (running games under GNU/Linux and used Ubuntu 11.04 and 8.04 versions).

Now I will not go into details since you can read it from this Phoronix page (including the hardware of the PC used and OS versions, etc) but to wrap things up Michael has concluded that in some tests (games) the opensource driver actually out performed the proprietary one!.

But in most situations it was the Proprietary one that won the "battle" at the end (Also worth mentioning that the GPU's being used are actually a bit older ones in today's standards). 

This is a no surprise since it consists of both opensource and proprietary portions and the proprietary portions means deeper hardware integration + the proprietary section of the AMD seems to have a bit more man-power than the opensource section at the moment. So, if you're looking for the best possible 2D and 3D (OpenGL rendering, Compiz, I hate you! :P) acceleration under GNU/Linux then you should be better of with the secretive AMD Catalyst Linux driver ;-).

Interestingly though that usually the OpenSource driver is a bit slowish (running about 60-75% speed of the proprietary one) and in Michael's own words...

"It is worth noting that AMD is not looking to achieve the same level of performance with their open-source driver as what is found with Catalyst. The 80~90% performance of Catalyst that we are commonly seeing for this older hardware is in line with what AMD's John Bridgman and others have been after. Additional performance can be squeezed out of the open-source code, but it is a matter of whether such investment is worthwhile..."

So I think that as time goes assuming the GNU/Linux will not just grow in numbers but in a rate that forces AMD (including other vendors) invest more time and money into developing a better optimized opensource driver (also supposing we'll be seeing a lot of popular games re-designed into GNU/Linux too) which should resulting an optimized completely (let's hope, anyone wanna prove "Adam Smith" is wrong? :D) open-sourced driver, finally.

Although according to Richard Stallman OpenSource does not represents the true subtle meaning of the idea of freedom (yikes!) ... but hey!, it's better than nothing! (not all hope is lost for GNU/Linux nonetheless). What do you think?.

Novacut Pro - Upcoming OpenSource, Professional Video Editor for GNU/Linux (created by "Artists for Artists")

Although GNU/Linux has as an excellent multimedia player (despite the whole "proprietary" issues :) ) support at the moment but when it comes to creating or editing videos in general, in a professional way... well, it kinda sucks :/. Although we do have excellent ones such as OpenShot for instance.

But it's not just having a lot of features or being simple ... it's about efficiency ... trying to find a balance between simplicity and usefulness. This seems to be the "philosophy" that the Novacut-Pro video editing suite developers believe in and they're building the editor from scratch, it seems.

In the Ubuntu Wiki page which "describes" how the UX should be and stuff ;-) ... the developers say....

"The singular goal of Novacut is to help artists become profitable... without giving up control, ownership, or compromising their creative vision"...

Listening to what artists need rather than trying to figure out everything by themselves which could lead to a disaster which has been proven again and again and again ...

"The last year we've spent a lot of time talking to artists, tuning our priorities. This UX design makes the conversation formal and publicly documented. But the conversation is just starting... we need feedback from many more artists, about many more details... always. Truly great creative tools cannot be designed in secret. They must be designed in open dialog with creators...

Because there is no film cost and HDSLR cameras are inexpensive, the biggest production cost is truly people's time, and we're quite confident Novacut will allow these artists to tell the same story, with the same impeccable production quality, in less time."

Interesting stuff isn't it :). Now, this is a real professional video editor that's aimed at the professionals (well, that rules me out :P). Novacut-Pro will support handful of equipments such as ...

*. It's optimized for Canon HDSLR cameras. Such as the 5D Mark II, 7D, 1D Mark IV, 60D, T2i, and T3i.

*. For audio syncing you'll have to use Sennheiser MKE 400 or Rode VideoMic, etc. But they said that they'll try to support those "usual" camera-mic-in as well. But don't keep your hopes high though.

*. Other professional digital audio recording devices such as Zoom H4n will be supported.

They use the Gstreamer multimedia framework as the application "engine" (rendering/editing videos). The application will also comes with Cloud computing support. Although it's not clear whether we'll be able to run the app itself in the cloud or not at the moment but they certainly are in favor of the Ubuntu One service nonetheless. The file distribution or sharing can be done pretty easily via the DML (distributed media library) framework (supports both local and Cloud storage) which is implemented as a Launchpad project at the moment. So, it's apparent that they're certainly in favor of the Ubuntu Linux distribution specifically.

It's not released yet but you can get upto-date information from this kickstartpage if interested and I highly recommend that you watch the below introduction video which explains a lot about this amazing (well, we'll see about that :D), upcoming professional video editor for GNU/Linux!. Oh yeah... it's Opensource and FREE too!.

"We're Done With Linux", Says Nokia

Nokia the mobile phone giant is having some troubles at the moment (well it's been a while now for them, and many "others" included) without a doubt. It's said that this year along (so far) Nokia's stock price is reduced by more than 40%! which obviously raises concerns, which is apparent.

Anyway, in a recent interview with Helsingin Sanomat (magazine), Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop said that ...

"I have talked a lot about how we increase our staff’s accountability, our empathy to listen to our clients and each other, and our aim to avoid being arrogant..."

The above quote is the answer for Nokia letting go of the MeeGo mobile platform (Linux based) as a result we won't see any Nokia phones with Linux in general (at least not in the near future).
 
We'll, if the numbers are correct and what he's saying is true then this is a desperate attempt to save Nokia from losing her clients. And according to Elop, some of the investors are not happy with the results, concerning the recent past (a year or maybe a bit longer), which seems to be the case.

Anyhow, what the heck does Linux has to do with it?

Well, to start with, sometime ago Nokia purchased the Qt toolkit (which is the GUI builder behind KDE desktop and thousand other application GUIs in GNU/Linux OS) and started to use it to design programs for their mobile phones. Not to worry, they didn't "touch" the license agreement (yet) thus Qt toolkit is still released in the GNU/GPL nonetheless.

What's "in-it" for Nokia?

Well, by using Qt they can create applications that can be run in their other mobile phone operating systems written using Java for instance with ease (because Qt in itself is a "framework").

So, if you have an excellent, Java written media player which was designed using Qt in a Java powered OS for instance, then you can "merge" or make it run in another Nokia mobile phone OS with ease by using Qt. This save both money and, oh well, it saves money :).

Nokia and Intel (including few other tech-giants) renamed the previously know Moblin project to MeeGo somewhere around last year in hope for finding/creating a "cost friendly" mobile operating system using the already existing MeeGo platform.

After bit of a "break" they introduced the latest Nokia smart phone powered by the MeeGo platform called N9 few days ago in Singapore and again Elop made clear the company's intentions even after praising the design, stability, look-n-feel of the N9 smart phone (the smart phone has already received a lot of positive feedback from both users and tech-experts), by saying...

"I have taken part in the conversations with the teleoperators and I have been part of the consumer test groups. The feedback has been extremely positive and I am sure that the Windows Phone system will be a great success.."

N9, the "newly-wed" ;-)...

So, even if the N9 with MeeGo is a great success/hit yet there's no turning back!. Now some say this is because of the lack of the availability of the applications (like Android market or MS Windows online store, etc) which could be true and one certainly can't ignore the power of the online application market any more.

But I highly doubt that MeeGo or Linux (it ain't really "GNU"/Linux since the license isn't fully compatible with GNU-GPL) not having a strong online applications has anything to do with it.

Because I mean come on, seriously!. As far as I know, N9 is the only smart phone that Nokia released which uses MeeGo officially (although the enthusiasts have run the OS in other Nokia phone models, etc) and they just started.

Elop himself said that even if the N9 is a "hit" there's no turning back. Why is that?. If what he meant by a "hit" was not just a success but a massive one, then where's problem?. This is not a judgement on Nokia or anyone but I think the reason is quite simple.

The real investors want better controllability which would ensure the safety of their investments which resembles their interests. But by drifting towards a Linux approach which, in its genuine sense tries to rule out the possibility of a centralised power would simply mean "unstability" from the Nokia's investors point of view because with platforms like MeeGo, does depend on the community, or so it seems.

Although not as "stretched" as Debin or other GNU/Linux OS, etc are since it's actually commercial companies funded it in the first place. Yet the visibility of not the actual users but the "free developers" can scare away the investors because unilke with the "actual users", but a with community driven developer-users, things can get a bit personal between them thus creating an environment in which making decisions can be a bit difficult. I maybe wrong here and easily be misguided but... that's what I feel.

But, I just can't help it any more but to think about, What is the purpose of GNU/Linux?. Lets forget computing, just for few seconds. But what is its real purpose. Is it going against our true nature as Mr. Mark and "others" seems to think?. Is it the reason for these "failures", you know, every time when it seems to be working-out nicely, then out of nowhere, shi* happens... I don't know.

To be honest, I'm too inexperienced to put together a reasonable answer to this. So, as an ending note, perhaps the following quote from Simon Phipp (an Open-Source expert) might help others like me, to get an insight into the matter ...

"Crocodiles are not evil; neither are they good. They are just reptiles, dealing with their hunger.To call something "a reptile" is not a value judgement; quite the opposite since reptiles are demonstrably amoral and mechanistic...

Despite their evil looks and repellant behavior, they are just being reptiles, doing what reptiles do. Working with them is not a matter of relying on their goodwill. It's all down to understanding their instincts - and learning to stand in the right place...

And that's what I mean when I say a corporation is just a reptile."

Install Red Eclipse Game in Ubuntu Linux

Red Eclipse is a free and open-source first person shooter video game that is based on the Cube 2 Engine (another very famous open-source game which is available for Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OSX, etc). Anyhow, Red Eclipse is not just a single player (you know shooting at your PC :P) game but you can play it in the multilayer mode as well.

Being open-source it uses the OpenGL API for creating cool 3D effects and it has a reputation of being fast as well. Although in the official game page, well you won't find much there but if you want to know more about the game before playing... then you could start first by reading this Red Eclipse forum where you'd find thousands of open-source game geeks :).

Anyhow, if you use Ubuntu then you can easily install Red Eclipse using a PPA channel. So as usual, open your Terminal and SPAM the heck out of it by entering the below command :P.

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:itachi-sama-amaterasu/redeclipse-client
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install redeclipse

Update:- (2011/06/02)

The  above PPA won't work in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, so if you use Natty, then you should be able to install Redeclipse by using the below command.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:arand/redeclipse

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install redeclipse

Here's the "proof" :P...

Guys, I haven't installed this because my Internet connection has a usage limit/cap, and it certainly can't handle 504MB of file size :o... so, can anyone confirm if this installs and works without any issues in Natty?

(thanks "Mattia", in the comment section for reporting this first)


You can have a look at the below video I found while browsing YouTube.