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AMD Promises Open Source Graphics Drivers

Posted by Zonk on from the feel-the-love-linux-gamers dept.

MoxFulder writes "Henri Richard, AMD's VP of sales, has promised to deliver open-source drivers for ATI graphics cards (recently acquired by AMD) at the recent Red Hat Summit. A series of good news for proponents of open-source device drivers. In the last year, Intel, the leading provider of integrated graphics cards, has opened their drivers as well. But ATI and NVidia, the only two players in the market for high-performance discrete graphics cards, have so far released only closed-source drivers for their cards. This has created numerous compatibility, stability, and ethical problems for users of Linux and other open source OSes, and prompted projects like Nouveau to try and reverse-engineer NVidia drivers. Hopefully AMD's decision will put pressure on NVidia to release open-source drivers as well!"

2 of 264 comments (clear)

  1. Intel driver Open Source? by slashdot.org · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Last time I looked at the Intel driver source, there were a ton of calls into the video BIOS. Not something I would call an "Open Source" driver. This may have changed since then,- I really hope so.

    Why is it important to have more source you might ask. Well, for one thing it would be really nice if we can get rid of the video BIOS altogether. A full source driver which shows how to switch video modes is a very good start to accomplish this (although not necessarily enough).

    And then you might ask, why do we need to get rid of the video BIOS? Well, when evaluating graphics chips for an embedded systems, I found out that the video BIOS can spend an insanely long time initializing stuff and displaying stuff that we don't want/need (some like several seconds). In general, video BIOSs are over-engineered and do waaaay more than needed.

    If you are aiming to build a near-instant-on system, and/or something that doesn't look like a PC, you want this sort of flexibility. If AMD steps up to the plate, that would be awesome.

  2. Re:Nice by OmegaBlac · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The problem is, most Linux desktop users use it to develop or manage it as a server. They won't pay for a game. They will not pay for anything at all, most of the time.
    I, a Linux user, am more then willing to pay for the same commercial games that are available for Windows. Matter fact I have payed already when I purchased UT, UT2k4, Quake 4, and Doom 3 which I have installed exclusively to play on Linux. I have no idea where you got the idea that most Linux users are unwilling to pay for software let alone games. Did you poll every single Linux user? Or did you form your ignorant opinion out your ass? I'm sure there is a large number of Windows users that don't pay for their software hence the existence of warez groups offering commercial software for free. And what about the large number of people unwilling to pay for Windows or games which drives many software companies to develop draconian drm & copyright protection measures?