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AMD Puts Out Radeon HD 6000 Open-Source Driver
An anonymous reader writes "AMD has just released their open-source driver for the Radeon HD 6000 series graphics cards (sans the Cayman GPUs) with KMS, 2D, and 3D acceleration."
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I think the issue with the open source radeon drivers isn't that the developers don't know how to implement stuff, or that it's a closed API or whatever. The problem is one of manpower. Reading the Phoronix forums it looks like there's maybe 2 guys that do the majority of the commits (for the really hard stuff anyways) and they just have too many things to do. I recall one post explaining that some kind of compiler was needed, and so one of the developers stubbed out a very simple one to be able to move forward on something else, with the intention of coming back and replacing the stubbed out compiler later, when the more critical issues were addressed. The compiler was a key component to all sorts of 3D stuff and was a critical factor in performance, but functionality and performance take a back seat to compatibility and stability.
My hope is that with the release of these open source drivers a lot of that boilerplate stuff will come with it, so that the community can truly focus on implementing newer APIs and such, although I don't know enough about video driver development to know whether that's necessarily the case.