[arch-general] since the fglrx legacy driver is now static - any will to make a run at getting it to work?

[David C. Rankin]

Listmates,

	One shortcoming that really irks me (and a whole lot of other laptop users) 
is the lack of an ATI driver for the meager hardware on most laptops. I don't 
know what the statistics are, but just from an educated guess standpoint, I 
bet that 50-65% of the current (in use and less than 3 years old) graphic 
adapters in laptops is ATI. (either Xpress or mobility Radeon chips).

	The difference in performace between using the radeonhd driver and the fglrx 
driver is 6-fold, only made that much worse by kde4 demands on the graphic 
subsystem. I don't know if there is any political/developer will for this, but 
for a majority of the ati laptop hardware out there (and desktop for that 
matter), we have the fglrx driver that is now static as of the 9-3 (version 
8.953) release of the "legacy" driver with ATI abandoning driver support for 
all pre 2400 series cards. In the past, the main reason for not supporting the 
ATI driver (not just Arch) was that it was too much of a moving target, 
requiring considerable work on the distros part to keep up with library 
changes, etc.

	Now with the driver static, I wonder if it might not be worth looking into to 
see if it is even feasable to try and make it work with the current arch 
setup. ( I know I'm not smart enough in this area to be of any use. ) The 
reason I bring this up I running arch on one drive I have for my laptop, and 
I'm limited to the radeonhd driver. It's getting better, but it has two 
achiles heels: (1) performance, and (2) heat (lots of it). Ultimately, the 
radeonhd driver will crack the black box and have a great driver, but 
currently, the combination of the issues is bad enough, I keep an old copy of 
suse 11 on another driver for use in my laptop, for no other reason than it 
has the working fglrx driver and I can work with my laptop without the fan 
noise and heat under my left palm caused by the lack of downclocking/powerdown 
of the unused gpu circuitry experienced with the radeonhd driver.

	I don't know if it is even worth looking into, but I do know that for laptop 
users, if Arch had a working fglrx driver, that would be one key point a lot 
of laptop users would be willing to switch for. Just a stray thought, so take 
it for what its worth.

	As for the current, still maintained, ATI driver for 2400+ series cards, good 
luck, it's still moving pretty fast....

-- 
David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.
Rankin Law Firm, PLLC
510 Ochiltree Street
Nacogdoches, Texas 75961
Telephone: (936) 715-9333
Facsimile: (936) 715-9339
www.rankinlawfirm.com