Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 5th Sep 2007 17:24 UTC, submitted by Rahul
AMD 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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There are many linux and unix distros.
by Toad on Wed 5th Sep 2007 18:32 UTC
Toad
Member since:
2005-11-27

And there are many version of the kernel.
So between 23 version of 2.6 kernel and 10 major distribution and say support for the two last version of distribution, I think there are plenty of money to save.

If you add fringe OS's (hobby OS's like haiku,specialized OS's) that now will have easy access to the hardware specifications they expand there market.

I think this is a graceful exit from Linux by AMD, and implicit acknowledgement of the deficient of their existing linux driver, both in stability and features(no AIGLX for example).

Zedicus Member since:
2005-12-05

aparently u missed the 8.41 ati driver release. and 8.42 will hav aiglx. 8.41 brings 50% to 90% performance increase on all cards across the board.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2

xxxspuddy Member since:
2007-05-12

I must have missed it too, it's not been released yet as far as I can see, or am I missing something?

http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/linux/linux-radeon.html

I hope the rumors about 8.42 are right, maybe I can finally get some decent framerates, picture quality etc. out of my x850

Any sign of xvmc support?

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 1