RadeonHD Driver Switches To AtomBIOS

[phoronix]

Phoronix: RadeonHD Driver Switches To AtomBIOS

A month ago we had shared that the RadeonHD driver would be switching to AtomBIOS, or the ATI video BIOS abstraction layer used since their R400 series graphics cards, and today they have completed this code merger. The Novell developers behind the RadeonHD driver have long preferred the route of banging on the registers directly than relying upon this closed-source (aside from the open-source parser) framework, but they had folded due to pressure from AMD with the time it's taken to support new GPUs and the developers behind held up waiting on register documentation to arrive. For the past month this AtomBIOS-ized version of the xf86-video-radeonhd driver have lived in a separate development branch, but today more than one hundred patches have been merged to master...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NjY1MQ

[jeffro-tull]

I thought AtomBIOS was open source, but written in microcode that the human mind just wasn't meant to interpret.

could be wrong, though.

[Louise]

Does this mean that Red Hat and Novell have agreed on a codebase?

[RoboJ1M]

So, are they going to go back over their code and remove AtomBIOS calls once the documentation arrives? I can see how they want to use it for same day support, but that doesn't stop them removing when they have their own register code does it?

[FunkyRider]

So, are they going to go back over their code and remove AtomBIOS calls once the documentation arrives? I can see how they want to use it for same day support, but that doesn't stop them removing when they have their own register code does it?

Don't fix if it ain't broke. If the AtomBIOS works good out of the box, who wants to reinvent the wheel...

[gsmd]

Does nvidia has smth similar to atombios, or it's just pure registers they code against?