DragonFlyBSD Picks Up Radeon Performance Improvements With Latest Code Update

[phoronix]

Phoronix: DragonFlyBSD Picks Up Radeon Performance Improvements With Latest Code Update

Slipping just past this week's DragonFlyBSD 5.6 release is now an early feature for the next series: continued work on the Radeon DRM driver ported to this BSD from the Linux kernel...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Radeon-DRM-DragonFly-3.19.8

[tildearrow]

Rher esi ary oi:

fan control improvements for GCN 1.0/1.1 graohucs cards,

[Guest]

I wonder if they report fan speeds? That's never worked for my GCN 1.x cards on Linux.

[Guest]

Wouldn't porting drivers from the Linux tree force the work that receives such code to be re-licensed as GNU GPL? Isn't this a GPL violation?

[smitty3268]

Wouldn't porting drivers from the Linux tree force the work that receives such code to be re-licensed as GNU GPL? Isn't this a GPL violation?

The driver code is under the MIT license, I believe, or something similar. So when it's brought into linux, it gets dual-licensed under GPL, but the BSD's can still use it under the original license in their kernels.

[Guest]

The driver code is under the MIT license, I believe, or something similar. So when it's brought into linux, it gets dual-licensed under GPL, but the BSD's can still use it under the original license in their kernels.

Makes me wish it was GPLed so any BSD that wants to take advantage of these drivers has to get re-licensed as well.

[smitty3268]

Makes me wish it was GPLed so any BSD that wants to take advantage of these drivers has to get re-licensed as well.

For what it's worth, the license choice was intentional by AMD (and matches all the other gpu drivers) - and also matches what Mesa and X use. The idea is that they wanted all those projects to be shared between Linux, BSDs, and whatever else wants to pick them up.