Open-Source 2D, 3D Drivers For ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series

An anonymous reader writes "AMD has now rolled out open-source 2D and 3D drivers for their ATI Radeon HD 5000 series graphics processors. As described at length over at Phoronix, it's taken nearly a year to complete but there is now public code released that enables 2D, 3D, and video hardware-acceleration for this latest generation of ATI GPUs. For now this code is intended for developers and enthusiasts but with time it will make its way into stable Linux distribution updates. AMD's open-source developers are also beginning to work on ATI Radeon HD 6000 series support, which is hardware not to be released until late in the year."

Comments

Re:Doesn't help with all the older cards.

[Cyberax]

Uhm. ATI has OpenSource drivers for _all_ hardware starting from r100 for Linux. And all their drivers support KMS.

Re:That's Realtek

[MostAwesomeDude]

I don't have an HDMI audio sink (feel free to send me one, BTW!) but HDMI audio should work on just about every Radeon that has it. The driver exposes the I2C controls for the audio to the rest of the kernel, and then the pre-existing ALSA code handles the rest.

Re:How much is real code? How much is blob?

[MostAwesomeDude]

Radeon firmware is used to program a few special-purpose chips on the board. Up until the HD series, firmware was only needed to start up the DMA engine and get acceleration going; modern cards need a second piece of firmware to enable interrupts, for e.g. low-latency audio and vsync.

If anybody ever wanted to go out and reverse-engineer these blobs, they could, but it's really not worth the trouble since the level of functionality is so small and AMD already gives us bugfixes for the ucode when needed. That time might be better spent figuring out the patented parts of the chipset (video decoding, texture compression) which AMD isn't allowed to document for us.

Re:nVidia

[ultranova]

Why? Unless the resulting drivers are actually better which remains to be seen, just the fact that they are open source is meaningless.

Says someone who's never had to try and update the latest version that supported his card by hand to make it compatible with the latest kernel. Linux doesn't have a stable driver/module interface, and that makes closed-source drivers an absolute pain.