Avivo Linux R500 Driver v0.1.0 Coming

[phoronix]

Phoronix News: Avivo Linux R500 Driver v0.1.0 Coming

Jerome Glisse has passed along word that version 0.1.0 of the Avivo Driver will soon be released. This open-source R500 and R600 driver for the ATI Radeon X1000 (and eventually Radeon HD 2000) hardware will have support for some shadow things and will be at least as fast as the VESA driver currently along with a few additional fixes. New PCI IDs for other Radeon R500 parts will also be added in Avivo 0...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item&px=NTg4MQ

[yoshi314]

some shadow things?

shadowbuffer perhaps?

[d2kx]

What is Shadowbuffer?

I am looking for AVIVO changes everyday and it seems to me that development is very slow at the moment and that only Jerome is developing it (from gitweb). But it also seems that they AVIVO is getting better when they already are as good as vesa and will continue with more features now.

PS: I bet that Fedora 8 will have this driver at least avaible after the fglrx issue they had with Fedora 7

[yoshi314]

well it was a closest thing involving shadow in the name.

shadowbuffering is a method of detecting 3d objects overlapping, but it's too early to implement it in avivo driver.

i'm not sure how quickly will they figure it out.

i'll have to review the r300 opensource driver development history, as it was a similar process (a bit rev.engineered, and a bit known (from previous generation specs) )

well if your card loves to lock up when it receives incorrect commands - figuring it out is not fast. that's what <=r500 cards do, and what r600 (and nvidia) supposedly don't.

if i were to rev.eng. such a nasty card - i would not make big progress quickly.

[Michael]

Jerome called it "shadow things" so that is what was mentioned in the news posting

Jerome is quite busy right now with his masters thesis, but he is still getting some good progress done. I have been supplying him a number of dumps, etc.

[d2kx]

AVIVO now supports nearly all cards (git) and more...

[glisse]

Originally Posted by yoshi314

well it was a closest thing involving shadow in the name.

shadowbuffering is a method of detecting 3d objects overlapping, but it's too early to implement it in avivo driver.

i'm not sure how quickly will they figure it out.

i'll have to review the r300 opensource driver development history, as it was a similar process (a bit rev.engineered, and a bit known (from previous generation specs) )

well if your card loves to lock up when it receives incorrect commands - figuring it out is not fast. that's what <=r500 cards do, and what r600 (and nvidia) supposedly don't.

if i were to rev.eng. such a nasty card - i would not make big progress quickly.

In our case its a lot more simple than that from vesa manpage:
Option "ShadowFB" "boolean" Enable or disable use of the shadow framebuffer layer. Default: on. This option is recommended for performance reasons.

Basicly there is a copy of the framebuffer in ram and all rendering happen in ram and only part that need to be updated are memcpy to VRAM. As currently there is no acceleration (blitting or filling) used in avivo this help a lot.

[yoshi314]

Originally Posted by glisse

In our case its a lot more simple than that from vesa manpage:
Option "ShadowFB" "boolean" Enable or disable use of the shadow framebuffer layer. Default: on. This option is recommended for performance reasons.

Basicly there is a copy of the framebuffer in ram and all rendering happen in ram and only part that need to be updated are memcpy to VRAM. As currently there is no acceleration (blitting or filling) used in avivo this help a lot.

i read it somewhere in irc logs some time ago, and i just couldn't recall that name. so my mind jumped into shadowbuffers, somehow :]

my bad.

[chrisr]

I've just bought a Thinkpad T60p Widescreen laptop with a Mobility FireGL V5250 chip (M56GL, I think), and was very annoyed to discover that the fglrx driver is currently incompatible with Fedora 7. So seeing as I'm stuck using the Vesa driver at ATI/AMDs pleasure, the Avivo driver doesn't have a particularly high hurdle to leap for it to become my new default.

All Avivo needs to do for me right now is:
a) Support the native 1680x1050 resolution. The VESA driver is limiting me to 1400x1050, so the screen looks stretched slightly horizontally. Doesn't 1680x1050 count as a "VESA-compatible" mode, or something? The log suggests that DDC is providing the correct mode-lines.
b) Be as fast as VESA
c) Not crash ;-)
d) Provide DPMS support so that the backlight can be powered down.

I'll probably provide radeondumps just as soon as I get fglrx working too.

[d2kx]

chrisr, just hold on a week.