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ATI R700 HDMI KMS Audio Support Coming Soon

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  • ATI R700 HDMI KMS Audio Support Coming Soon

    Phoronix: ATI R700 HDMI KMS Audio Support Coming Soon

    A few months back HDMI audio support came to the ATI Radeon kernel mode-setting driver and while this support is in place with the mainline kernel, it's only supported up through the ATI R600 hardware with the KMS driver. However, HDMI audio support for the R700 (Radeon HD 4000 series) is soon coming...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    Woo hoo

    I can finally stop using Mediatomb to watch media from my wee PC on my PS3 just to get audio

    Phew that was a mouth full

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    • #3
      Nice, I haven't thought that peoples from my very close vicinity do such serious development.

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      • #4
        legal review

        Originally posted by phoronix View Post
        AMD has had patches for greater HDMI audio support (including audio interrupts), but these patches have been held up in legal review for months and so Rafał came up with this new alternative.
        This seems to apply to a lot of AMD code (especially the RS780 Coreboot code, which is in legal review for over half a year now).

        Does anyone know what they do review there and why this takes so long?

        Because I get the impression that there's a lot of code piling on someones desk, somewhere deep down in the legal department of AMD, but nobody cares, because lawsuit xy needs to be won...

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        • #5
          The legal review of RS780 coreboot code is indeed taking very long. It is over a year now (since February 2009), that AMD had working coreboot code.

          If I understand correctly, the legal review did not start until summer 2009 and the code touches domains of different groups at AMD. For some reason, the review appears to have been done sequentially (ie. passed from one group to another) instead of in parallel, which might explain why it took so long.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by Zapp! View Post
            This seems to apply to a lot of AMD code (especially the RS780 Coreboot code, which is in legal review for over half a year now).

            Does anyone know what they do review there and why this takes so long?

            Because I get the impression that there's a lot of code piling on someones desk, somewhere deep down in the legal department of AMD, but nobody cares, because lawsuit xy needs to be won...
            It's not really legal review. The lawyers mostly ask the senior technical folks if the info is safe to release -- frequently the answer is "no" so the code has to go back and be changed so that it still works but using different parts of the hardware.

            Not sure about the history of the Coreboot review, but the reviews are inherently parallel wherever possible. I suspect the issue with Coreboot is simply that it touched on a lot of new areas so it took a while to find out all the teams that needed to be involved. I know the Coreboot code landed on my desk recently -- I'm hoping to finish my part of the review over the weekend.

            Audio has a different set of challenges. The IP is nearly all third party and comes from *multiple* third parties. All of the IP came under NDA, and since there was no plan to ever release it at the time there was no need to maintain traceability between the finished product and the original suppliers, ie it's not even obvious whose approval we need to obtain for each part. The developers are doing a great job trimming down the requested IP to the smallest amount possible, which is usually a big help in getting approval more quickly, but in this case we don't have the mechanisms in place to translate the specific details back to the original IP transfers. In cases where we can be confident the IP is all ours the release process is more straightforward, but even there it's not simple because audio hardware is lousy with DRM stuff just like video ;(

            Anyways, the key point with these reviews is that whenever something takes a long time that often means the review happened, the answer was "No !", and now we're trying to find another way to implement the functionality without treading on that particular IP mine. That's definitely the case with audio, not sure about Coreboot.
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            • #7
              Originally posted by bridgman View Post
              Audio has a different set of challenges. The IP is nearly all third party and comes from *multiple* third parties. All of the IP came under NDA, and since there was no plan to ever release it at the time there was no need to maintain traceability between the finished product and the original suppliers, ie it's not even obvious whose approval we need to obtain for each part. The developers are doing a great job trimming down the requested IP to the smallest amount possible, which is usually a big help in getting approval more quickly, but in this case we don't have the mechanisms in place to translate the specific details back to the original IP transfers. In cases where we can be confident the IP is all ours the release process is more straightforward, but even there it's not simple because audio hardware is lousy with DRM stuff just like video ;(
              Any idea if this will be easier for Evergreen? I sure hope some of these reviews are plowing the road so you don't have to start at scratch every time.

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              • #8
                Yeah, each new generation gets easier, but only to the extent that blocks don't get redesigned between generations. Our focus during the first couple of years was entirely on the graphics side - chipset stuff (and audio was a "chipset thing" at the time) wasn't even on the radar. That's why the Coreboot code is treading new ground as well.
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                • #9
                  @bridgman:

                  Wow, thanks for that detailed reply! I hope the coreboot code will see the light of day at some point

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                  • #10
                    wow,

                    thanks for this info!

                    Can I ask how many developpers at AMD work on the linux drivers (closed, open and other such as coreboot)?

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