AMD: Accelerating Open-Source Drivers?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD: Accelerating Open-Source Drivers?

So far today at Phoronix we've published the AMD 8.41 Display Driver Preview, ATI R300/400 Linux Performance, ATI R500 Linux Performance, and ATI Radeon HD 2900XT Linux Performance -- yet, it's only ten minutes past midnight! However, looking at AMD's official statement on the Linux driver, there is a rather interesting sentence about good things to come...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=10977

[miltiad]

Can't wait !

Keep up the good work Phoronix guy(s?) !

[schestowitz]

Hey guys,

You can help by Digging this (if you have a Digg account and only if you think it's Digg-worthy).

http://digg.com/linux_unix/Breakthro...0_Times_Faster

It seems like it'll make it into the front page.

Thanks!

Roy

[hmmm]

I just hope when the code is released, it's in a form that can be easily be integrated with current open source drivers. The recent work being done on AVIVO and the ati open source drivers is very good.

[chrisr]

That's the obvious inference, if AMD would rather concentrate on the R500/600 chips these days. I am assuming that R300/400 is purely "legacy" hardware now.

[R3MF]

there is now a chance that i will purchase an ATI/AMD video card.

i have always preffered AMD and I have wanted to purchase ATI since the acquisition, but found myself totally unable to do so in the face of awful linux drivers.

i know the hardware is equivalent to that of nVidia, so with the driver issue out of the way i may well be tempted to buy ATI vid-cards in future.

[yoshi314]

I am assuming that R300/400 is purely "legacy" hardware now.

it will be legacy when more people will have r600/r500 than r300/r400. currently it's far from it.

[Michael]

AMD's efforts are indeed focused on the R600 (and R500) series.

[chrisr]

Originally Posted by Michael

AMD's efforts are indeed focused on the R600 (and R500) series.

So it would make good business-sense for AMD to offload the on-going driver support for any R300/400 based hardware to the Open Source community, and then delete that support from the shiny, new fglrx code-base?

[rolz]

it's nice that you guys know.

But i feel like a horse running after a carret suspended 10 feet ahead from a fishing pole.

It would be epic if it's an opensource hardware accelerated 3D driver, but then again, maybe we will just get 7 more slides about the release train ...

I'm just impatient, have struggled quite a bit... currently have no 3D on xorg 7.3.. and even building it against my current kernel is a challenge. o and that control pannel has a nice feature of segfaulting

But if I would have to make a wish list:
- opensource (i'm not too fanatic on this one, but would be brilliant, no more binary patching away watermarks or other crashes)
- aiglx support
- performance improvement
- when loading display the text "rolz is great" in big golden letters instead of logo's

I'd say there allowed to drop one of those, and i would still be happy