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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."
Atleast they have released the specs out to OSS developers and are working towards a accelerated solution. There used to be a time when only Nvidia cards used to run at full power on Linux. Go AMD!
The current offering doesn't promise 2D (EXA) acceleration or 3D support.
So if it doesn't offer 2D acceleration or 3D support... what does it do? Framebuffer mode? Seriously why would ATI even release a driver in this pathetic of state, at least when I can buy an nVidia card for the same amount and have 100% of features work just fine.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
FTFS:
The DDX driver supports mode-setting on the Evergreen/R800 series GPUs with VGA and DVI connectors
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.
Some reading between the lines is needed.
Any r600 acceleration code *should* work with only minor tweaks on Evergreen (r800). The biggest changes are supposedly in GPGPU-land; r800 supports a lot more shader instructions than r700 or r600.
I don't have one of these yet, but I'm sure Cooper and Richard, the AMD 3D devs, are furiously coding away to make stuff run.
~ C.
>and this code has finally cleared AMD's legal review.
Has nothing in it that we feel might be secret or licensed....
Doesn't do 3D CHECK
Doesn't do 2D CHECK
Passes our legal review- let people enjoy it now!!!!
Wow, attack the guy's name. Nice. Maybe he should go by "Anonymous Coward" like all the cool kids.
In fact, Alex has been developing open source drivers for ATI cards for years on his own dime, and AMD only relatively recently hired him to do the same thing for money. Would a little gratitude to either of them kill you?
Alex, the only reason I could see anything from my Radeon card for the last six years was because of your work. Thank you!
Also important: it supports userland mode-setting, *not* kernel-based mode-setting yet.
For the last time, PIN Number and ATM Machine are redundancies!
i am the troll. thank you so much for feeding me. trolling would be SO DAMNED BORING if no one did that. thanks again, by showing that they will get responded to you have inspired me to troll some more. i might have gotten discouraged without you!
I've had a R600 based radeon HD3870 on linux for a while. I used to go with the fglrx proprietary drivers, but I've recently switched to the radeon (ddx) driver.
I have to say I'm extremely happy with the Open driver. Now is it Free Software? I'm not sure, I mean *most* of the driver seems to be, but you still need to load microcode firmware.
As far as the quality of the driver though, it seems very bug free and the kernel mode setting is awesome. Switching from vt-1 to an Xorg session for example is instantaneous. Mesa seems to need some work on the 3d side, but you can play quakelive on it and run the kde version of compiz.
It's really great that ATI has both released documentation and paid developers to work on getting these drivers up and running, they should consider both sponsoring some 3d work on the mesa side and also figuring out a way around the microcode situation.
Liberty.
Its great to see some hardware companies coming out with open source drivers for their technology. Even if the driver is so far incomplete its at least a good starting point which will hopefully be improved on. I feel that by providing this sort of information AMD may have a repreive which will help it have a fighting chance in the future. Its such a shame that Via have not been doing more with their graphics drivers in Linux. I really wish that openchrome had more support given that so many cheap nettop/netbook style systems have via chipsets (at least in asia).
I think you got modded troll because there is no 'wrong' mod. The specs that they have released have been as complete as you could ever realistically hope for.
The specs that they have released have been consistently late. Instead of providing them in advance of the release of the hardware they are continually released well afterwards (if the continual bitching about same from ATI owners is any indication) forcing strict FOSS users to buy last year's card at best if they want the full functionality of their hardware, which still does not work for many older cards (esp. regarding acceleration and TV out) for many users who have otherwise-supported hardware.
Believe me, I don't want to give nVidia too much credit; their driver doesn't support my shiny new video card, a GTS 240 that I bought for its decent performance and low power consumption. Or maybe it does now, I'm out of town so I haven't been checking. Two beta drivers released after the release driver I'm using (which incorrectly identifies the card) caused spontaneous reboots sometimes, and X to consume all system resources at other times. But the card is working with that release driver, and my system is stable. I've never had this result with any ATI hardware and any ATI driver on any operating system; again, I've suffered with every ATI video chip since the Mach32.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"