On 05/25/2012 11:56 AM, Phong X Nguyen wrote:
On 24 May 2012, at 0544, zxq9 wrote:A digression about the driver on SL6: The annoying thing is that every time you update your kernel you'll need to rebuild the drivers against the new kernel headers. The awesome part is that the driver building process is mostly automated for you, AMD has lately done a very nice job of maintaining its driver set for Linux, games, CAD, and anything else graphical you want to do really fly on an A8, and all this is free (both types of "free" -- AMD opensourced its Linux drivers, so the Catalyst package is no longer "evil", or at least not as evil as it once was).Can you use DKMS to automate driver building on kernel update?
I haven't messed with it myself, but it certainly should work fine if you just want to keep the same version of Catalyst around.
Since the AMD driver release updates nearly as often as the Kernel itself, I've been building new fglrx rpms with the latest driver against each new kernel as they come out and keeping them in our repo. Some of the driver updates bring significant performance imrovements that actually matter to us, so we try not to miss any.
I haven't found a way to completely automate away keeping track of the new AMD releases yet, though, so keeping fglrx rpms up to date is a lot like packaging a high-frequency project for a distro (as in, treating AMD Catalyst essentially the same way you would an upstream project).
Anyway, DKMS is simple enough to set up that feeding it new Catalyst releases as they come out shouldn't be too difficult. (Well, from my understanding anyway. Again, I haven't done this myself yet, though I might give it a shot if I can get some time to play with it -- though even if any part of it is difficult the situation should be routine enough that wrapping any needed re-configuration process in a script should be trivial.)
