An Effort Making An Open-Source Radeon Video BIOS

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 27 July 2013 at 09:11 PM EDT. 55 Comments
RADEON
OpenRadeonBIOS is a new open-source project seeking to create an open-source video BIOS for AMD/ATI Radeon graphics cards.

While AMD has their open-source Linux driver stack, their GPU's BIOS hasn't been open-source though in years prior there was talk of reverse-engineering the ATI BIOS. That project didn't pan out but now there's a new developer claiming to have an open-source video BIOS for Radeon hardware.

His claim was made in our forums and he cites his SourceForge.net OpenRadeonBIOS project page.

At the moment there's one file (vbios0.0.7z) from yesterday. In digging through the source to this supposed Radeon BIOS, there's a mix of old and new code, including VBE code from more than one decade ago.

Supposedly this open-source BIOS will work with Windows XP and then under Linux can work using the open-source Radeon driver at least for CentOS and Lubuntu. However, it seems only VGA connections are supported (no HDMI/DVI/DP) and there's likely a host of other limitations.

The README also doesn't say which Radeon GPUs are actually supported. However, for those wanting to dig deeper into this new open-source Radeon GPU BIOS project, hit up the links above.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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