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

I would have had the first post...

[MarkRose]

I would have had the first post, but I was waiting for my browser window to scroll.

Now for your part

[Bruce Perens]

Go out and buy some. And then help to make the driver rock-solid, if you're capable.

We've got to reward the companies that do this.

Bruce

Re:Here is your benefit

[rantomaniac]

You have the source. You can compile it yourself. If it doesn't work the way you'd like, you can change it.

Sure, but the glacial pace at which Gallium3D and its drivers advance is a testimony to how hard it must be to write a graphics driver. If it was a job for your average programmer, the guys working on this stuff would have given us functional drivers two years ago. At this pace you'll be able to enjoy stable and fast R700 hardware support another 3 years from now.

In the future, when those drivers are done, they will surely be benefits to them being open source. But the only actual benefit now would be if some ingenious hacker got involved, committed and wrote the drivers in a couple months. Currently the development model isn't working very efficiently, because R600 docs were released over 2 years ago and we're only beginning to see functional drivers.

Open source works better when the barrier to involvement is lower, OpenGL infrastructure is more complex than most kernel drivers. It requires:
* knowing the OpenGL API intimately
* a firm grasp of 3D math and rasterization process
* an idea how to manage non-uniform memory and do low level hardware access in a thread-safe way
* a fair bit of compiler design for compiling shaders to GPU instructions
* all of the above done in C, because we still haven't developed a better language for low level work (see this paper for things a driver design language could have)

Re:nVidia

[Bert64]

The binary driver they produce which you cannot fix if it breaks, and neither can your distro maintainers... you are at the absolute mercy of nvidia for bugfixes...
The binary driver that only supports x86/amd64 (so no putting your card in a small arm based media player for instance)
The binary driver that only works with certain versions of X (ie you can't upgrade until nvidia let you)
The binary driver that only works with certain kernel versions (ie you can't upgrade until nvidia let you)
The binary driver that will sooner or later drop support for your card, leaving you tied to an old X and kernel version.

I'd rather not have a binary driver... You are far too dependent on a single entity, who would rather sell you a new card even if the old one is still perfectly adequate for your needs.