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AMD Releases Open-Source R600/700 3D Code
Michael writes "AMD has just released code that will allow for open-source 3D acceleration on their ATI R600 and R700 graphics cards, including all of their newest Radeon HD 4xxx products. This code consists of a demo program that feeds the commands to the hardware, updates to their RadeonHD driver, and a Direct Rendering Manager update. With this code comes working 2D EXA acceleration support for these newer ATI graphics processors as well as basic X-Video support. AMD will be releasing sanitized documentation for these new ATI GPUs in the coming weeks. Phoronix has an article detailing what's all encompassed by today's code drop as well as the activities that led to this open-source code coming about for release."
Or just good economical sense.
"Hey Bob, these kids on the Internet want to write Linux drivers for our cards."
"Oh really? Have we had any customer requests for Linux drivers lately?"
"Yeah, a couple."
"Send 'em that dev code we did last week, see what they come up with."
"Ok."
Shocking!
How we know is more important than what we know.
I had almost forgotten to pay my $699 licensing fee. Makes me feel like such a cock-smoking teabagger!
Er, what exactly is Nvidia doing in this regard? They've put out more or less OK closed drivers for Linux for a number of years now but they go out of their way to frustrate FOSS efforts. The "open source" nv driver is obfuscated. About all you can say about it is that it compiles to a basic 2D driver.
Intel releases fully realized drivers and some docs. ATI/AMD is releasing ever more complete docs and more or less cruddy closed drivers. With the help of Mr. Weite, VIA is starting to release docs and is co-operating with current FOSS driver authors. I don't see Nvidia doing anything of this sort.
AMD doing nice shit just makes it all the more heartbreaking when Intel releases better chips. I hope they get their shit together soon, I feel dirty with a Core 2 Duo.
I chose ATI over Nvidia in my most recent graphics card purchase because of ATI's policy.
Thanks ATI; it's the right thing, and it will help your revenue.
I am looking forward to see what this means for Linux, OpenCL and other GP-GPU goodies. With OpenCL working along side OpenGL, a tightly integrated kernel ATI driver that handles the GP-GPU/OpenCL stuff we will really see some interesting stuff come our way. To my understanding OpenCL allows someone who is writing an algorithm to implement it in OpenCL and let OpenCL take care of diving up the work load between GPU's and CPU cores. Damn I am really excited to see the OSS community tie all this stuff together and release the computing power of the GPU to more general yet compute intense applications.
A system with a quad core CPU and four ATI cards would be a force to be reckoned with! Fast trans-coding/cracking of Blu-ray, rapid key sniffing for air crack, even networked applications could be sped up like IPsec and SSH. We could have fast rendering in blender and ray tracing can be done with high precision as well as speed (maybe even real time!). Gimp plug-ins can be given a boost in speed and video editing a breeze. Even a laptop with a slower dual core could benefit from its on board GPU's number crunching power. Useful for cracking WEP/WPA keys.
And AMD/ATI arent the only ones getting on board the OpenCL bandwagon, Apple developed it, and Intel along with Nvidia are also going to support it. So OpenCL will allow us to run our apps on the hardware of our choice.
The parent has pegged a round hole with a square question. Hardware support in Linux works well if you build your own machines, or happen to get one with supported hardware. How do you find a system that is fully supported and for which distributions?
This is still a problem for F/OSS software. Some distributions are better at handling the problem than others. For many end users, finding a proprietary driver and installing it on Linux is a deal-breaker.
I'm glad to see that ATI is moving toward support for all OS software, but it still leaves the general community with a problem. That problem won't go away until hardware manufacturers support F/OSS out of the box. It means changing their model and prospective future business plans to some extent.
I'm willing to bet that if everyone who *REALLY* wants to see great F/OSS drivers for ATI were to plop down $5 USD it would make a difference to how they are thinking about releasing drivers. Yes, $50,000 might not be much but it also might make a difference to ATI. This falls into a category of donations that I've talked about before.
Finding who to donate to is not always easy since many apps are hidden from the user, such as Samba, drivers, etc. It would be good if there were some place people could just drop a donation for the distribution they are using and feel safe that some percentage of that went to all those apps that are part of the distribution. This always brings up some heart felt discussion, but I think something like this is an awesome thing that would help drive better development for F/OSS software. See, getting $1.75 per user is a lot of money to some F/OSS teams. Hell, even fifty cents would be a lot more than they are getting now. So a donation of 50 or 75 bucks could mean a lot to many people. I try to donate to the apps that I use the most and I KNOW how difficult it is to do that.
If anyone is interested in progressing such a thing, contact me. I can probably find some time to donate to this as a project.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Based on what's been on IRC in the past few hours.
Q: Wait, what?
A: Code for radeonhd and the kernel providing acceleration for Radeon HD 2400 and newer. Kernel parts are already pretty much integrated; radeonhd is integrated as well, although stuff still needs to be copied to radeon.
Q: So what does this mean for the user?
A: EXA means faster GUI responsiveness. Xv means fast video. Kernel DRM is the basis for all acceleration unification (OpenGL, etc.)
Q: Speaking of OpenGL...
A: Lawl, no. Not for another few months. Most of the code we're gonna write will target Gallium, so--
Q: Gallium?
A: Gallium is the next generation of GPU acceleration. Once we get drivers ready, it'll be awesome. Linky to TG: http://www.tungstengraphics.com/wiki/index.php/Gallium3D
Q: So this is just docs and some basic code?
A: Nope, no docs. AMD couldn't agree on docs before their vacation time, so I guess we'll see those in a month or so. On the other hand, we've got enough here to do a lot of stuff. It'd be nice if we had more devs, though. :3
Q: So why is there only code for radeonhd? Will radeon support this too? Why two separate drivers?
A: The reason for two separate drivers is a very long and largely silly story. I don't feel like repeating it, and I probably couldn't tell it fairly anyway.
I'll get radeonhd code ported over to radeon once my vacation's over, assuming nobody does it sooner. I can't do the HDMI audio setup without testing hardware, though; does anybody want to donate an HDMI audio-enabled monitor? :3
~ C.
~ C.
We all joke about his billions of dollars, but to see them put to use attempting to vaccinate an entire continent, I gotta tell ya that is a pretty damned impressive thing to do.
Sounds good on the face of it doesn't it? But look a little closer. The entire vaccination program is about intellectual property - countries have to forgo local pharma factories that produce medicine without paying royalties - despite it being perfectly legal to do so since most of those countries do not recognize foreign patents anyway.
But if someone asked me "who did more good, the guy who saved x-hundred-thousand kids or the guy who donated an improved scheduler algorithm to the Linux core?" there's only one way a human being could answer that question.
If you are going to cherry pick the question, then of course the outcome is predetermined. But what about taking into account the source of all that money in the first place? How much of the world's GDP has microsoft skimmed off the top? Money that would have been re-invested into the domestic economies all around the world, resulting in improved economic and living conditions without having to go through all the fat-cat middlemen, each taking their cut of that money before it eventually comes back around in the form of a "charity?"
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
True or not, they're still giving the Linux community exactly what they've been asking for: documentation to write good drivers for their devices. It's win-win for everyone.
Problem is that the drivers you're referencing and the Carmack's comments on them date from around 2000. Lots has changed in the meantime. FWIW, the Carmack was referring to Rage128 era hardware/software, which was one unusable ball of software workarounds for hardware bugs and hardware workarounds of legacy software bugs. ATI threw it all away and started fresh roughly around the time they ditched the Rage architecture and had released drivers on the newer codebase when they released the second-gen Radeons. The hardware wasn't fully new-gen and pretty until roughly Radeon 9700.
They repeated the process on a smaller scale again roughly the time the X1K cards were released (software restart) and around the time the HD2K cards came out (completely new hardware generation).
This is all just a lot more info than you needed, but the simple answer is 'Yes, everything has changed since the paleolithic quote's time. Twice'.
The current quality of ATI/AMD's Windows drivers is debatable, but I'd be entirely comfortable saying 'they are very comparable in quality to Nvidia's current drivers'.
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.