New Open-Source Radeon Driver Features

While most of the open-source ATI/AMD excitement these days is all about the RadeonHD driver, Alex Deucher is working on a few interesting changes for the Radeon (R200/300/400 hardware) driver. The latest Radeon driver available through git now attempts to handle the status of laptop lids to prevent a BIOS problem while the driver is loaded. However, this will only work right now if you boot with the lid closed. Alex has also merged the r128 driver into the Radeon driver, with mode-setting and MMIO acceleration now functioning. DRI and X-Video should also be working for r128 hardware using the Radeon driver in the near future. Some of the benefits of this merger include RandR 1.2 support for the r128, TV-Out support, better BIOS table support, and one less driver to PCI rework. More on the Radeon driver work can be found in Alex Deucher's new blog and all of the recent changes can be found in the FreeDesktop.org git for the xf86-video-ati driver.