R500 Reverse Engineering Information

[Michael]

Originally Posted by michaellarabel

David Airlie has mentioned to me this week that a new reverse engineering group has begun work on the ATI/AMD R500 series. David is not taking part in this group (due to existing NDAs with ATI), but this project is current led by Jerome Glisse. Jerome was one of the open-source r300 drivers, and he also has another one or two others helping out...

http://www.michaellarabel.com/index.php?k=blog&i=56

[Michael]

Today I heard from Daniel Stone who is one of the people working on the R500 reverse engineering. At this point they are still in the early stages of this new driver but within a few weeks they hope the register dumps will become useful. Daniel stated that within a week he hopes they'll be ready for a Wiki at FreeDesktop.org and to throw up some code. So far their development efforts have only been powered by a Radeon X1900 and a Apple MacBook Pro, but soon will be looking for the community to help out (I have already promised them quite a few card dumps). So within a week or two there will hopefully be some new information about the ATI R500 reverse engineering!

http://www.michaellarabel.com/index.php?k=blog&i=82

[yoshi314]

finally i'll be able to have 2d acceleration on Gentoo/BSD ^_^ (hopefully) - the lack of proper 2d video drivers is actually the only thing that discourages me from trying it out.

wonder how long is basic 2d implementation going to take. how long did it take to provide working 2d acceleration for r300 cards in radeon driver?

[Michael]

If I recall correctly, it didn't take too long in the r300 series due to the source being available to the r200 driver. Due to the r200/300 driver, this new group won't need to spend as much time as the Nouveau guys are doing. The main thing for the r500 driver being worked on now is mode-setting. I would possibly expect a working 3D driver out this year (perhaps for X11R73), though the information known at this point is limited but that would be my professional guess.

[yoshi314]

any hopes for some update?

i don't see anything on dri-devel , freedesktop.org or x.org websites yet.

are they still busy adapting the tools for that task? (just curious ).

[Michael]

Originally Posted by yoshi314

any hopes for some update?

i don't see anything on dri-devel , freedesktop.org or x.org websites yet.

are they still busy adapting the tools for that task? (just curious ).

They are still working on modesetting and things with the clock frequency. I haven't been briefed yet of any updates this week yet since one of the main developers has been ill.

[yoshi314]

sweet, thanks for the info. good to know that you'll give more updates on this, when they're ready :]