Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 5th Sep 2007 17:24 UTC, submitted by Rahul
LWN.net writes: "A quick report from the kernel summit: AMD's representative at the summit has announced that the company has made a decision to enable the development of open source drivers for all of its (ATI) graphics processors from the R500 going forward. There will be specifications available and a skeleton driver as well; a free 2D driver is anticipated by the end of the year. The rest will have to be written; freeing of the existing binary-only driver is not in the cards, and 'that is better for everybody'. Things are looking good on this front. More in the kernel summit report to come."
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Member since:2007-03-03
I agree I'm glad AMD/ATI has finally embraced the FOSS community, but I must say, don't count your chickens before they hatch. Phoronix is reputable and I like their site a lot, but, no one aside from the editors at phoronix have seen these drivers, they certainly aren't in the wild. I have faith in AMD and have since I traded my 486-DX2 in for an AMD K5. It's too bad that they let the linux drivers suck so bad for so long though, because I totally just purchased an Intel dual core processor/mobo and an Nvidia 7600GT so I could finally have my perfect Linux box. Maybe I'll pop my Ati x1600 Pro back in after the drivers are released.
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Member since:
2006-02-01
This is a fantastic decision from AMD, and I applaud them for it. I've always favoured Nvidia cards in the past due to their vastly superior Linux support, but if AMD are true to their word then I may see myself going for ATI cards in future (which is, of course, AMD's intention).
It's also quite a slap in the face to all those other vendors who claim they can't release product specs for "commercial reasons"; there is not a single field of computer hardware that is as fast-moving, as competitive and as advanced as GPU designed, and so if ATI can do it, nobody else can have any excuse.