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."

Comments

Put your money where your mouth is

[Enderandrew]

For all the Slashdot posters who keep begging for Linux support and talking about how big companies constantly ignore you, this is your chance.

Buy AMD. Be vocal that the reason you're buying an AMD video card is because of their driver. Vote with your wallet.

(On the CPU front, you can make an equal case for Intel supporting open source).

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[CynicTheHedgehog]

For what it's worth, my AMD CPU and ASUS motherboard (quad core AMD 870 chipset) work just fine in Linux, as does my AMD/ATI video card. As did my previous AMD CPU/motherboard. I have yet to be disappointed by them.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[drinkypoo]

Maybe you should stop running the Pre-Alpha version of RHEL and move up to a distribution intended for end users if you don't want to solve problems and do Alpha testing for Redhat.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Anonymous Coward]

Only reason you'd get a segfault is because fglrx is installed. Remove it or ati-drivers (it's called one or the other) and you should be able to configure with the regular xf86-video-ati driver, which should at the very least give you smooth 2d if drm isn't available, and 3d/kms if it is (and the kernel is later than 2.6.36 or so.)

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[scruffy-tech]

Nvidia has had excellent Linux drivers for years, open source or not they work. I avoid ATI video as much as possible and it'll take more than token of support on AMDs part to change that now. They may be geniune and may win me over, but I'm not jumping on this bandwagon just yet. I'll keep voting with my wallet in favor of Nvidia for now.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Carewolf]

NVidia's linux drivers have been incredibly buggy for years now. I recently changed the open source nouveau drivers which easily solved all performance problems I had. NVidia is both poorly implemented, has poor support for moderen X11 extensions (XRandr), the recent 26x series also has VERY serious memory-leaks which slowly brings your computer to a crawl.

Btw. I am not stating this as a user, I am stating this as a develop who has been working on getting KDE to work better on NVidia hardware.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[OFnow]

With Ubuntu 9.10 , Intel Core Duo, ASUS board and an ATI card (new in late 2009) the screen had ugly little dots appearing and disappearing.
And red thin streaks appearing and disappearing. The proprietary driver did not work at all (I forget exactly what it did).

Switched to an nVidia card and no more weird artifacts. I sure hope ATI/AMD has fixed all that with the new open source drivers,
but it makes no sense to me to switch back just in case ATI works now!

VAAPI Acceleration?

[0100010001010011]

I didn't see any mention of VAAPI or XvBA Acceleration for playing media? How about OpenCL support?

Granted the HD 6000 looks more like a gamers card than something you'd stick in a home theater pc, but I'd think that OpenCL support would interest quite a few people doing massive number crunching. Especially since there's even PyOpenCL available.

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[Evanisincontrol]

Phoronix released a followup article today. A driver supports X video acceleration, but no VAAPI yet. Like you said, these cards seem to be aimed at gamers, but with the prevalence of HD video content these days, I'd be surprised if VAAPI wasn't a high priority for this driver.

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[drinkypoo]

Statistically nobody cares about OpenCL, but the lack of video acceleration (if there is indeed a lack) is a serious oversight.

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[wuzzeb]

Phoronix released a follow up article that looks a little closer. There is XVideo support but no VA-API, XvBA, or VDPAU. But this article says that there are plans for XvBA and VA-API for the ati drivers, and work is progressing on VA-API support for gallium.

For OpenCL, the classic mesa drivers have no support and no support is planned. But gallium has some support for OpenCL (see mesa/clover), and just today the gallium support for HD 6000 series has been released. So now the HD 6000 has both classic mesa drivers and gallium drivers.

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[0100010001010011]

Fast, cheap number crunching? Isn't that why the Army bought a ton of PS3s to utilize the Cell cpu? Amazon just released new EC3 process that gives you 2 Nvidia CPUs for number crunching, and they're not cheap either.

OpenCL is the "Open" CUDA solution. I believe CUDA actually supports OpenCL at this time too.

Given a choice between "100% Open Sourced" Non useful driver like this and NVidia's "Free as in Beer" driver that has been kicking ass for a long time in the XBMC and for people that do use CUDA, I'll take Nvidia.

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[CynicTheHedgehog]

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.

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[Kjella]

It's not an oversight, blame DRM. Everything about their video decoding block (called UVD) is heavily coupled with the protected video path they have to provide for BluRays and other protected content. That means you have to have lawyers and tech people going over everything with a fine tooth comb and how much easier it would make it to reverse engineer the missing bits. It doesn't matter if AACS is broken and BluRay rips are everywhere because the contracts are still valid and the terms and penalties are as nasty as they get. AMD has said they will try to get changes to make it more open source friendly in the pipeline but new designs are started 3-4 years before release and it's probably not on their top 10 must do changes.

That said, multi-threaded H.264 decoding has improved very much in software and I have no problems decoding 1080p video with that on my desktop CPU, it probably hurts a bit in power usage but at least you *can* do without. Hardware acceleration is more important for laptops and battery life, AMD is working on it but this is a very hard problem and they need most of the resources getting support for new architectures like the HD6000. This is not like much other software, hardware moves fast and in close sync with the closed source drivers. If the open source developers don't keep up, there won't be any support at all. P.S. DRM is also one of the reasons you can't share more of the "fundamentals" with the closed source driver. That would make it too easy to decompile the Windows/Mac driver to track and grab the protected content in transit. It really is a big hindrance to open source drivers.

AMD has taken ATI to a new level

[NtwoO]

In the past two years I've migrated from 10+ loyal Linux NVidia years to ATI. The ATI closed source drivers were reasonable whilst the NVidia drivers showed a slide in performance and stability (on my system in any case). Since September last year I've migrated my machines to the open source 3d drivers and what a beaut! My MythTV frontend with ATI onboard is impeccable. It'll require much to convince me to change away from ATI/AMD if they keep this kind of support available.

Re:AMD has taken ATI to a new level

[Anonymous Coward]

Come back when we have hardware acceleration. Linux video playback needs CPU horse power. Even the iphone/ipod touch handles h.264 video better than linux. Whether we like it or not, that's the defacto codec these days and decoding is built into just about every device and video card. And yet, linux still cannot use them. Windows had it in '06.

Re:AMD has taken ATI to a new level

[morgauxo]

I had a similar but opposite experience some years ago when I switched from ATI to NVidia. Is ATI actually working better than NVidia again? My card works great for it's age but my hardware is pretty old. Back when I preferred ATI I remember shelling out money for a few cards while never getting 3D acceleration to work decently. Finally I switched to NVidia. I don't want to risk buying 3 cards to finally end up with a working one again. Should I try AMD/ATI?

Patent-covered algorithms?

[fph il quozientatore]

I thought the biggest stopper in building OSS 3D drivers were that they usually contain technologies covered by software patents. What happened to the patented parts? Have they been stripped out of this OSS version, with the effect that it is now slower than its closed-source counterpart? Or did they find another way out?

Re:Patent-covered algorithms?

[Kjella]

The closed source drivers remain closed for many reasons, but I think licensed code is a much bigger part of that than patents. The open source drivers are built separately from scratch and are in general much slower yes. They have estimated - and don't take this as an official AMD statement but guesswork from the people working on it - that the open source driver could reach 60-70% of the closed driver on average using the simple architecture they've chosen. Simply because the closed source driver has a ton of code paths and optimizations for various situations, the OSS team is much, much smaller than the closed source team and can't possibly replicate that anyway.

AMD Puts Out Radeon HD 6000 Open-Source Driver

[thomst]

I didn't realize it was on fire.

Re:How usable is 3D support?

[Kjella]

No, OpenGL 2.1 is the highest supported, but this is because Mesa - the open source implementation of OpenGL - doesn't support anything higher. Somebody needs to implement OpenGL 3 and 4 before there can be drivers for it.

Re:How usable is 3D support?

[Daniel Phillips]

Mesa GL 2.1 is already quite kickass, with a very capable shading language and plenty of extensions covering most of the advantages of OGL 3/4. The main improvement I'd like to see is geometry shaders, which are getting close.

Re:huh

[CynicTheHedgehog]

I realize this is a troll, but I recently upgraded my system and initially couldn't boot Ubuntu. No big deal, I thought, I'll just install Windows and use that until Natty comes out, and maybe I'll have better luck with the new kernel. So to get my Windows environment up to speed I had to install a third-party, 32-bit IM app (Trillian) for which I had to register a new account I'll never use; I had to install Microsoft Security Essentials and Live Essentials (of which I only would use Live E-mail); I had to download and install OpenOffice; download and install all of my drivers for all of my devices; download and install Collab Subversion (which also requires an account registration), TortoiseSVN, and Maven; and then I had to set up paths, etc. After all that (about 10 hours of downloading and installing) I still didn't have a decent terminal and no SSH. So I had to download PuTTY, which, while good, is no substitute for gnome-terminal and GNU utils. Still no less, tail, grep, vi, symbolic links, mount utilities, etc., so I was looking at *also* installing Cygwin (32-bit!) and dealing with that hassle.

Not to mention that there were 59 critical updates that took about 3 hours to download and install.

Needless to say, about 24 hours into the change I was nearly having panic attacks at the prospect of using this system. I was seriously contemplating downgrading and sending my new parts back and eating the restocking fees.

Luckily it turns out that my Ubuntu issue was related to a hardware conflict between my old Audigy 2 card and the on-board IEEE 1394 on the new mobo (I think). Once I ripped out the Audigy I didn't have a single issue with Ubuntu. Took me all of 2 hours to install the OS and what I needed via the software center, and that including downloading and installing the 212 updates. (Note that more than half of the stuff I had to manually install under Windows was already there in the base Ubuntu install, and I didn't have to register any accounts.)

From time to time I look at hardware compatibility, video performance, etc. and think that I might be happier in Windows. And maybe I would be, if I didn't have to do anything productive. But from a development perspective Windows is Hell, and I will not go back to it by choice.