RadeonHD 1.2.5 Driver Released

[phoronix]

Phoronix: RadeonHD 1.2.5 Driver Released

The RadeonHD 1.2.4 driver was released back in December and since then a lot of work has went into this open-source driver through the partnership between AMD and Novell. Over the past few months they have made significant process, but also faced some setbacks, like losing a key X developer...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzE5NA

[colo]

Jibber-jabber. Give me hw-accelerated GLX with this (or the other) free driver on R7XX, and see me buy two mid-to-high-end AMD/ATi-Graphics boards right now.

[Dinth]

Am i right, that this release took all features from new "ati" releases?
Why this works only one-way, so "ati" cannot take "radeonhd"'s 3d support ?

[bridgman]

Am i right, that this release took all features from new "ati" releases?

It's probably more correct to say that the new features were added to both drivers at roughly the same time. In areas where the code was largely common the same developer usually merged their changes into both drivers at the same time (agd5f's work on 6xx/7xx EXA & Xv acceleration is a good example). Where the code was significantly different there was more of a time lag between a feature appearing in one driver and appearing in the other (because the change had to be at least partially re-implemented).

Why this works only one-way, so "ati" cannot take "radeonhd"'s 3d support ?

Remember that there are three driver trees involved -- the ddx (radeon/radeonhd), the drm (kernel) driver, and the mesa (3D) driver. 3D work is done in the mesa and drm trees and the resulting code can be used with both radeon/ati and radeonhd.

The radeon/ati and radeonhd drivers have the same level of 3D support today (they use the same mesa and drm code) and they should both pick up 6xx/7xx 3d support at roughly the same time in the future.

[DoDoENT]

The radeon/ati and radeonhd drivers have the same level of 3D support today (they use the same mesa and drm code) and they should both pick up 6xx/7xx 3d support at roughly the same time in the future.

So what is the point then in having two drivers instead of one?

[parapup]

I installed radeonhd from git master only couple days ago and while it worked, I was having frequent screen corruption - minimizing windows for example, left a black/grey pattern behind most times. This is with a 4670 card on a KDE4.2.2 desktop system.

Will report this on IRC later but anyone know if 2D is supposed to work well with this release on R7xx cards?

[bridgman]

So what is the point then in having two drivers instead of one?

The two drivers are still fairly different in terms of display/modesetting code and overall structure. The 2D/video acceleration code is somewhat different for earlier GPUs but pretty close for 6xx/7xx.

[susikala]

So if I get it correctly, bridgman, it means that using the latest (released) versions of -ati and -radeonhd together with any version of 2.6.30 will get you the latest xvideo support and 2D acceleration on R6xx/R7xx?

So in the practice, after 2.6.30 is out there will be no need to compile from git to get those latest features?

[agd5f]

So if I get it correctly, bridgman, it means that using the latest (released) versions of -ati and -radeonhd together with any version of 2.6.30 will get you the latest xvideo support and 2D acceleration on R6xx/R7xx?

So in the practice, after 2.6.30 is out there will be no need to compile from git to get those latest features?

Correct. r6xx/r7xx EXA and Xv should work out of the box with 2.6.30.

[MostAwesomeDude]

So what is the point then in having two drivers instead of one?

That's a good question. I mean, that's a *really good* question.