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

Nightmare

[Anonymous Coward]

There is some amount of ridiculousness here - perhaps I don't understand something but explain to me if you will, how this works - Every time a new GPU is released, a shit load of new driver code is required to just get it working. And then there a a truck load more of code required to get 2D acceleration working. And then the same for 3D. How come the GPU vendors do not have a freaking portion of their hardware always work the same way, with same driver code - it just does mode setting and sets up the GPU for decent level of 2D acceleration. The you write a per GPU, dynamically loadable module that will deal with that particular family of GPU. I mean there is not a whole lot you can do with modesetting and 2D - no one cares of 2D accel anymore - it should just work the same way with same driver code for all series of GPUs for a particular vendor. NVidia has to drop support for older chips, fork the driver and have it only support newer chips because of bloat that it becomes having to support different families of GPUs each requiring lots of code.

Re:So what does it do?

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

I'll run closed code, but it's bloody well not going to be something as crucial as my video drivers. I've done it before, and I'll never do it again on my main computer.

How many years did it take for nVidia to add DRI support to their driver? Xinerama support? Not-corrupting-the-virtual-console-when-running-more-than-one-instance-of-X support? Do they support XRandR 1.3 yet? (That last question isn't rhetorical---I've stopped following the status of nVidia's proprietary drivers.)

The last time I used them, the nVidia drivers exhibited a severe case of Not-Invented-Here syndrome, and they weren't particularly stable.

I really don't know where all these people come from who say "nVidia's drivers just work". I suspect it's just a lack of experience with *actual* stable drivers. The best X driver experience I've had is with free drivers for hardware that's a few generations old. Super stable and everything *really* just works.