Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 9th Sep 2009 22:29 UTC, submitted by lemur2
Open source 3D graphics drivers for ATI R600 garphics cards has been submitted to the kernel-next tree for possible inclusion in the Linux kernel 2.6.32. "David Airlie has pushed a horde of new code into his drm-next Git tree, which is what will get pulled into the Linux 2.6.32 kernel once the merge window is open. Most prominently, this new DRM code brings support for kernel mode-setting with R600 class hardware as well as 3D support."
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Member since:2007-02-17
PS from what I have read, most of the drivers were written from using provided documentation, and not reverse engineered (some of the r300 may have been RE though), so Kudos to AMD too for playing ball.
The new code (just being released now) for R600 (and R700 apparently) has been written using provided documentation from ATI. Kudos indeed.
The earlier drivers, for R500 and older GPUs, were reverse-engineered. These are for an older architecture of GPU, and those cards are no longer supported by ATI's proprietary driver.
RE[2]: R700+ also supported
by yfph on Fri 11th Sep 2009 04:10
in reply to "RE: R700+ also supported"
Member since:2009-09-03
ATI released documentation for R500's too
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_tcore_releas...
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Member since:
2008-03-08
The R6xx driver also covers the newer R7xx cards, so they are also supported.
Some things are still buggy (some screen corruption bugs, not optimised for speed yet), but hopefully by the release of Fedora 12 (and maybe even Ubuntu 9.10 if they also use the patches), so until the next generation of graphics cards from AMD, all of them should be supported to some degree.
Once this is stable, the major laggard will be nVidia. I wonder if they will decide to take part, or even if these devs can help reverse engineer the drivers for nVidia.
PS from what I have read, most of the drivers were written from using provided documentation, and not reverse engineered (some of the r300 may have been RE though), so Kudos to AMD too for playing ball.
Edited 2009-09-09 22:40 UTC