RadeonSI Gallium3D Driver Gets A Big TODO List

[phoronix]

Phoronix: RadeonSI Gallium3D Driver Gets A Big TODO List

The AMD Radeon HD 7000 "Southern Islands" graphics cards have been on the market for about nine months now, and while there is AMD Catalyst Windows/Linux driver support, the open-source driver support still leaves a lot to be desired. If you are a developer looking to dive into open-source graphics drivers, a comprehensive TODO list has been written...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTE3MDY

[entropy]

This is great.
Together with the hopefully upcoming book about graphics driver programming and
well documented mesa code (is it?), this TODO list is surely a good start for newbies like me.

[curaga]

There were similar TODOs for a long time on the xorg/dri wikis, just not well advertised.

[Veerappan]

Various LLVM bits like handling the TGSI KIL opcode

Already done as of a mailing list message today... and it's already gone from the TODO

[uid313]

At the same time, with AMD currently not exposing their UVD video engine via open-source

With AMD you are a second-class citizen and you cant do proper video acceleration in open source.

With Intel you are a first-class citizen with a dedicated official open source team with proper support for video acceleration open source drivers.

[bridgman]

The AMD Radeon HD 7000 "Southern Islands" graphics cards have been on the market for about nine months now

Seven approaches nine for large values of seven ? First retail shipments were in January, it's now August.

Perhaps the first half of the year is considered to be better than the second half, making it "the better part of a year"

[necro-lover]

Seven approaches nine for large values of seven ? First retail shipments were in January, it's now August.

Perhaps the first half of the year is considered to be better than the second half, making it "the better part of a year"

Who cares about your retoric ? AMD lost money because of this be sure there are people who don't buy onle because of this.

And maybe this is the only language AMD can unterstand the people just need to stop buying AMD products then maybe AMD unterstand.

[chithanh]

Seven approaches nine for large values of seven ? First retail shipments were in January, it's now August.

Neither is correct. Launch was in December 2011, first 7970 cards appeared in retail in Greece before New Year. So it is almost exactly 8 months now.

And maybe this is the only language AMD can unterstand the people just need to stop buying AMD products then maybe AMD unterstand.

No, because you don't buy from AMD. It is the OEMs that do.

[bridgman]

Neither is correct. Launch was in December 2011, first 7970 cards appeared in retail in Greece before New Year.

Interesting. Launch for 79xx was in December for January delivery to end customers, ie nobody was supposed to be able to buy hardware in December (although boards would have been shipped *to* retailers to build up stock).

Someone in Greece must have jumped the gun... or maybe advertised them but not shipped until Jan ? There *was* a lot of that...

The rest of the GCN family (Cape Verde and Pitcairn) started shipping 1 and 2 months later, depending on the model.

[chithanh]

The 7970 cards were sold to consumers in December 2011, and forum posts with photos and benchmarks popped up at the usual sites.

I understand that the launch was originally planned for January 2012 but was pulled in because AMD wanted to avoid a repeat of the 4800 series situation, where actual retail availability was before launch. (Dave Baumann of AMD explained on Beyond3D forum a bit)