VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Oct 31 2011 - 10:12:15 CDT

Hi,
  I'm soliciting feedback from any VMD users that are running
on Linux systems using the ATI GPUs or graphics chipsets, to
find out how stable the current crop of ATI drivers are.
For a period of a few years, there were stability problems
with the ATI drivers on Linux, but things have slowly improved
and if possible, I would like to turn off some VMD safety code
that prevents the old buggy ATI drivers from crashing, since
this code costs a significant amount of performance in cases
where the drivers are working fine. In order for me to make
this change safely, I would like to hear from people that
are using the ATI/AMD commercial graphics drivers with VMD
on Linux, in particular in the case where they have disabled
the safety code using the VMDDISABLEATILINUXWORKAROUND
environment variable. It would be nice if we could turn off
this code for VMD 1.9.1 by default, but only if the current
crop of ATI/AMD graphics drivers are stable enough.

Thanks,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/           Phone: 217-244-3349
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/       Fax: 217-244-6078