The AMD "Radeon HD 8000" Open-Source Milestone

[mendieta]

what are the odds of having any of the 'closed" driver develprs also contirubing to the Open drivers too, even in mionr bug-fixing fashion? Not beign and insider I don't know how big a role "clean-room" concerns come into play with patents are licensed technology...

That's a great point. Would it be possible to re-structure the Closed Source code in a way that a lot of the stuff is shared with the OS version? And then hooks for either binary bits for patented stuff or OS counterparts.

If this was implemented that way, then the clean room concerns would be limited to those bits, and it would all be easier for everyone. Of course there may be reasons why that is not feasible ...

[V!NCENT]

You are living in the past. AMD has more than one guy on CoreBoot, just read the news.

Well my desktop tower isn't realy in the 'embedded' region

[devius]

I have ATI 3200, which I guess is much slower then Your card and i have realy smooth system interaction.Try change some compiz, maybe disable compiz V-Sync...

Either that or there is no hardware acceleration for some reason. What's the output of

glxinfo |grep rendering

HD4200 here and also very smooth with compiz. KDE's Kwin is sluggish though.

[glisse]

That's a great point. Would it be possible to re-structure the Closed Source code in a way that a lot of the stuff is shared with the OS version? And then hooks for either binary bits for patented stuff or OS counterparts.

If this was implemented that way, then the clean room concerns would be limited to those bits, and it would all be easier for everyone. Of course there may be reasons why that is not feasible ...

The closed source driver will not be opened, people should stop trying to come up with a bright idea about. The closed driver is so big and so intermigle with sensitive technology (content protection stuff) that it doesn't make sense to open it. Moreover it's a completely different codebase, it could not be integrated with mesa.

[devius]

The closed driver is so big and so intermigle with sensitive technology...

Maybe it's such a mess and so badly coded that it would drastically reduce AMD's stocks if everybody could take a look inside it Oh wait... that's Windows.

[mirv]

Maybe it's such a mess and so badly coded that it would drastically reduce AMD's stocks if everybody could take a look inside it Oh wait... that's Windows.

Sadly, and I'm guessing you're aware of this, a lot of proprietary (and open source no doubt!) software is just....munted. Comes with top management wanting deadlines over maintainability, and then of course later there's other things to do and you don't get a chance to go back an clean things out, another deadline looms, hacks are made, and so the cycle continues.
I'm quite sure there are interesting comments in any the code for any proprietary driver, from stressed out and annoyed devs.

[bridgman]

I should make it clear that the "hd7xxx" and "hd8xxx" names came from curaga and I responded using the same terminology - I don't know what future generations of GPUs will be called when they hit the market.

[crazycheese]

Just.
Dont.
Buy.
Proprietary.
At all.


If you see the alternative.

[Qaridarium]

I should make it clear that the "hd7xxx" and "hd8xxx" names came from curaga and I responded using the same terminology - I don't know what future generations of GPUs will be called when they hit the market.

i think thats not the problem because hd7770 sound so sexy

or hd8888 special edition

[devius]

I should make it clear that the "hd7xxx" and "hd8xxx" names came from curaga and I responded using the same terminology - I don't know what future generations of GPUs will be called when they hit the market.

Funny... if those end up being the final names, the radeons will go back to the same name they had 11 years before (with an added HD, and probably a bit more processing power).