AMD Publishes Open-Source "ATI Evergreen" Driver

Several readers have written to tell us that AMD has published their code to support the Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" graphics cards on Linux in an open-source driver. Unfortunately the driver isn't quite as complete as some might hope. The current offering doesn't promise 2D (EXA) acceleration or 3D support. "The DDX driver supports mode-setting on the Evergreen/R800 series GPUs with VGA and DVI connectors while the DisplayPort connectivity is still not working right, according to AMD's Alex Deucher who had written most of this code. These new AMD graphics cards have been around since September while there was no open-source support at that time. In December just before Christmas there was Evergreen Shader documentation that was made publicly available and around that time it was confirmed via our forums that initial VGA mode-setting was working with Evergreen internally on unreleased code. Since then the digital connector support has been added in and this code has finally cleared AMD's legal review. The revised target was to publish this code by FOSDEM, which is this weekend so AMD did hit the target this time."

Comments

Re:So what does it do?

[nxtw]

It will matter in 5 years when you want to use Linux on a computer and you discover that the proprietary driver hasn't been updated in two years. So then what do you do? Use a 2 year old version of Linux?

This is a flaw in Linux/X.org.

Windows 7 manages to support the same graphics driver interface as did Windows 2000, which is nearly ten years old.

Re:Baby Steps

[jedidiah]

...you can always add a cheap nvidia card to it later and have a remarkably better setup.