Tear-Free Acceleration For ATI EXA, Xv

[Louise]

Yeah -- if you look at the display controller then 4xx/5xx is the logical split, but if you look at acceleration then 5xx/6xx makes a lot more sense.

The radeonhd initiative was driven by the need for modesetting support, while the post-4xx radeon work was driven by the need for acceleration support. We hope the two efforts can pull together over time. I suspect that once we reach a common understanding on requirements, priorities, design / coding practices and the importance of things like kernel modesetting the rest will be easy

I read that the reason Red Hat is devoting man hours in this is because they have customers demand. Or if I remember right, they said they had one customer that could see a business model for OSS gfx drivers.

So I am wondering, is Novell's and Red Hat's demands/needs the same?

E.g. does Red Hat put emphasis on something else than Novell?

[bridgman]

AFAIK the original reason for pushing ahead with radeon was that RH had a specific customer program which needed 2d acceleration and didn't feel that radeonhd would be able to make the schedule based on progress to date. By adding atombios support to radeon they were able to use all of the existing 2d accel code since the 2d block was pretty much identical to previous generations.

A contributing factor was that both the radeon and avivo developers were OK in principle with writing a new, atombios based driver for 5xx and above rather than building on their existing code, but when radeonhd turned out to be mostly hard-coded the idea of adding atombios-based support to radeon started to look more attractive.

[Louise]

Wow.

I really think that Red Hat and IBM are interesting companies. I fear to think how much Red Hat spend on Ice Tea!

Have Novell said anything on why they are dedicating so much effort and money?

[jeffro-tull]

Hmmm, I might have to ditch my geforce 6200 in my tower in favor of my old Radeon 9000 Pro. The extent of my 3d needs are Chromium BSU (when I'm too lazy to go into the other room and fire up R-Type III). As long as I get damn-near-spotless 2d support (which Nvidia has been sliding downhill with) I'm happy.

[bridgman]

Have Novell said anything on why they are dedicating so much effort and money?

I think everyone is trying to achieve the same ends -- to advance what can be done with Linux and expand the potential market. Both Novell and RH are trying to "give back" where they can. There are some differences in the RH and Novell customer bases today and so they do have some different short term priorities. Please don't ask me for details

[Louise]

I think everyone is trying to achieve the same ends -- to advance what can be done with Linux and expand the potential market. Both Novell and RH are trying to "give back" where they can. There are some differences in the RH and Novell customer bases today and so they do have some different short term priorities. Please don't ask me for details

I won't =)

But I was surprised to read that Ubuntu decided to include the OSS gfx drivers for Ubuntu 8.10. Would have expected they didn't care, since they have the closed source drivers in their repositories.

[DeeZiD]

Does this mean that it's soon possible for me (with my dirty HD2600 mobility) to watch video and use a composited desktop without any tearing like in vista or macosx?

INCREDIBLE!


Dennis

[bridgman]

I don't think any of the distros want to be totally dependent on proprietary drivers when they are being expected to provide a seamless user experience on a huge variety of hardware. By booting the open source driver out of box they have the ability to cherry-pick specific fixes which match the rest of their release, although I don't know how much of that is done with Ubuntu.

[curaga]

Does this mean that it's soon possible for me (with my dirty HD2600 mobility) to watch video and use a composited desktop without any tearing like in vista or macosx?

By this you of course meant you get tearing only in vista and OS X

[DeeZiD]

By this you of course meant you get tearing only in vista and OS X

ahhrgh
My English...