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AMD Releases Open-Source Radeon HD 7000 Driver
An anonymous reader writes "AMD has publicly released the open-source code to the Radeon HD 7000 series 'Southern Islands' graphics cards for Linux users. This allows users of AMD's latest-generation of Radeon graphics cards to use the open-source Linux driver rather than Catalyst, plus there's also early support for AMD's next-generation Fusion APUs."
I would be much more interested to know if Llano is fully supported in 3.3 kernel. With 3.2, if KMS is enabled, the screen blanks as soon as the radeon module is loaded (even before X starts).
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
AMD could help itself a great deal by focusing on open-source support. Intel does a pretty damn good job supporting open-source with drivers, but they lack top-end graphics hardware. nVidia provides a solid binary, but their *NIX support lags behind Windows.
If AMD becomes the number #1 graphics hardware on Linux, it could help even out their hot/cold CPU offerings.
No sig for you!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager not http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management
I want this account deleted.
I look forward to hearing from actual users how well these drivers work.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
I was one of the first people to give AMD credit for making the decision to release specifications when ATI was bought. How naive I was. We shouldn't be supporting AMD until they come clean and release sufficient specifications for use on free operating systems. Intel remains to be the only company with graphics chipsets that are well supported on GNU/Linux and free operating systems. The ATI 3d acceleration is still dependent on non-free software. Only the 2d works on free systems. Right now they just release some parts. Don't let this fool you. You will still get stuck later should AMD go bankrupt, sell the division, leave the market, or simply decide to end support like all companies eventually do, etc.
Nope. I prefer having an all around good system than one that is slightly "better". Non-free drivers and firmware effect other parts of the system and I won't subject myself to that punishment. I left Microsoft Windows for a reason. I will NOT be going back.
Judging from the average hashrate, there are more than 5 of us. :)
And this will do what?
consumers everywhere rejoice!
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
What the hell does "DCE6 display watermark support" mean?
I googled for it and didn't find anything useful.
It sounds ominously like cinavia for video.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Don't get too excited. Some intel chips use PowerVR, which has no OSS driver (from intel as well as from anyone else) see here
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1. Enjoy your job
2. Make lots of money
3. Work within the law
Choose any two.
Thanks for wasting electricity in your pointless quest for worthless bits
If they give away their CPU architecture for free under an open license, how do they charge royalties? Who is going to make an AM64 CPU with no x86 support?
Yes, like all the new Atom cpu's
I'm still waiting for 4D.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I'd switch to AMD permanently and buy a new AMD video card tomorrow if I was sure they're serious. I want decent 3D acceleration in the open source drivers for Linux. Neither Nvidia nor ATI ever delivered on this. The proprietary Catalyst driver is something like 5x the speed of the open source driver. Nvidia is even worse. That's totally unacceptable. Some years ago, ATI announced they were opening up, and I got ready to dump Nvidia. And then... it didn't happen.
Intel? What a joke! Their video performance is so horrid that they can't beat AMD on the dog slow open source driver no matter what driver they use. Until Intel improves dramatically, they're out of the picture.
So I'm not celebrating yet. Sounds like this may well be another empty gesture.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
The ATI 3d acceleration is still dependent on non-free software. Only the 2d works on free systems.
Complete nonsense. I am doing OpenGL development at this very moment using the fully open Radeon driver. Your post has too many inaccuracies to address. If it were possible to retract it, you probably should.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Thanks for completely misunderstanding Bitcoin.
No. And that's not the point of mining anyway. The point of mining is to secure the network; any profit made from it is just the incentive. If your own electricity costs too much for there to be any incentive for you, then just buy the bitcoins outright, since doing that will be cheaper.
Do you also come out richer every time you buy something using Paypal?
ATI announced they were opening up, and I got ready to dump Nvidia. And then... it didn't happen.
Actually that's what did happen, they said they'd open up and for the most part they have - the instruction set for "decent 3D acceleration" is out there. A decent CPU analogy is that they promised x86_64 specs, you expected GCC. It doesn't magically make a team that's 2-3% the size of the proprietary team magically able to be 50 times as efficient, worse yet the hardware radically changes from generation to generation like now from VLIW to GCN which is basically to start over. And it continues to expand with geometry shaders, tesselation, new display standards, new chips etc. so it's a rapidly moving target.
For example, Mesa just got OpenGL 3.0 support last month, the standard was released back in 2008. That's not just lack of a driver, there's not even an implementation to accelerate. Of course you could say that AMD should release their proprietary driver/OpenGL implementation which would be nice indeed but isn't practical on so many levels and certainly not something they promised. Your post is essentially why nVidia doesn't want to get involved with OSS, it's "Whaaaaaaa give us specs, we'll write the code" "Okay here's specs" "Whaaaaaaaa performance sucks, write the code too".
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I wasn't suggesting that they give it for $0 - I was suggesting that they make the architecture open source, say w/ a license that allows anybody to study the code, but charges a certain amount if someone wants to use for commercial purposes i.e. to fab a CPU. In other words, they could charge $x to a licensee for signing up, and $y for every chip sold. The licensee then just has to do incremental work on the design in terms of aligning it w/ whichever fabs they're working w/, which won't involve AMD directly. The license could also have a mechanism to pull in any innovations made by the public, sorta in the way GPL does, but it doesn't have to have all, or even most aspects of GPL.
As for who would want to make such a chip, it would not be a bad idea to start. Let's say a company wanted to do such a CPU w/o 32-bitness, by the time such a chip was fabbed out and had the sort of yields that could support their market, the minimum RAM that would be available would be 4GB anyway. And as more apps become 64-bit, the lack of 32-bit support won't be a problem, just like the lack of 16-bit support isn't a problem.
Some intel chips use PowerVR, which has no OSS driver
And no windows driver either. Obviously, that's hyperbole. The chip does have Windows drivers and Linux drivers. The Windows ones are beyond terrible and the Linux ones were even worse.
This may have changed when since I last looked, but I'll bet the intel partners were furious for being given a dud with such awful drivers.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I am still waiting for a working 5700 series driver.
The closed driver contains lots of bugs and is unstable, the open driver lacks features and has bad fan control. In short, one pile of failure.
Bitcoin is silly, but how much electricity did you waste making this post and having thousands of people download it?
I wasn't suggesting that they give it for $0 - I was suggesting that they make the architecture open source, say w/ a license that allows anybody to study the code, but charges a certain amount if someone wants to use for commercial purposes i.e. to fab a CPU.
Also known as *not* making it open source... Unless you're talking about living off the patent licenses.
How can I use acceleration with the Radeon driver and without the appropriate firmware binary blob? I think the GP is taking issue with that.
It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams
Do you also come out richer every time you buy something using Paypal?
Well, yes, that's the point of trade. I exchange something (in this case money) for something that I perceive to have higher value.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
While "true", the realistic alternative is the firmware blob residing in ROM on the graphics card.
I'm still waiting for 4D.
Ahh, so I figure you finally want to see that overhyped second frame.
Let me tell you, after you've seen one, you've pretty much seen them all. ;-)
I think it would make more sense for them to license ARM and make a competitor for Tegra. I'd certainly be interested in a netbook/pad based around that technology.
That's precisely what I'm talking about - living of patent licenses. Also, open source doesn't mean that people are free to do what they like - like I mentioned, if they want to use it for commercial purposes, they can put normal terms & conditions involved in selling. It would be something like QPL, except that since the average person doesn't just go to a fab and give them the models, the paid aspect of the commercial usage would be more acceptable than it was w/ Qt/KDE.
I found myself in the market for a graphics card recently, and after the research and hassle of figuring out what has been released as open source, I decided to delay the decision by sticking with an older NVIDIA card I had kicking around.
Now that I know this series of AMD cards is supported with open source drivers, I'm much more comfortable running it in my Linux desktop than my old NVIDIA card, which requires their proprietary drivers.
That's actually what they need to do if they want to stay relevant, because their competition has done it.
And by competition, I don't mean nVidia. I mean the truly monstrously huge behemoth, whose claws and fangs are already dripping with so much AMD blood, yet who is dismissed every time graphics hardware comes up, because their hardware is merely low-end integrated crap. You know who I mean.
Low-end integrated "crap" is what 95% of the world needs, and with each passing year that fraction increases a little, as people realize that "crap" keeps getting less and less crappy. That's where the real money is. That's even where AMD's own Llano is! About a month from now, people will see the "crap" bar has moved again, crossing yet more peoples' threshold for what isn't really crap, and God Help AMD a year from now.
There's no "Whaa" anymore, because AMD's real competition is writing and releasing the Free code, so instead of crying, people can just buy their amazing hardware. (Amazing, if slightly limited on graphics, and "slightly limited" is itself so subjective!)
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Low-end integrated "crap" is what 95% of the world needs...That's even where AMD's own Llano is!...
Many people do agree with you which is why people are asking if the Llano support within the open source drivers is working yet. (Anecdotal...) I have a moderate 46xx series ATI card in my linux box which I can use happily with the open drivers. Performance isn't top notch but I have never needed 100% of its graphics capabilities. In my Llano laptop it is still all Windows 7. In the future I would be happy with another AMD APU system once the open driver support is better. The performance available with Llano is all I need to be paying for, spending more is wasteful.
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
That's actually what they need to do if they want to stay relevant, because their competition has done it. (...) You know who I mean.
More like the other way around, today AMD and Intel both have OpenGL 3.0 support through mesa while AMD has OpenGL 4.2 through catalyst/fglrx. If AMD went through the trouble of opening their implementation then Intel would essentially get a free pass to that, not to mention an invaluable lesson in shader optimization tricks and that'd benefit nVidia too. Even if it were possible it'd not be in AMD's best interest.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I built a desktop system for myself last June with an AMD 'APU' in it. At the time people were talking August for ATI's open source reveal, so I put my old nVidia card in it. It's still there, obviously.
Assuming these parts went to fab before I could buy them, this puts ATI's lead time on open source drivers for new chips at about a year. That's probably 1/3 the useful life of the part. Hopefully for the last 2/3rds I'll be able to take advantage of that power savings.
Serious question: how do they test these chips? Are they really using Windows drivers in the development lab? That seems unnecessarily hard.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
PowerVR doesn't have any open-source drivers - the only ones you get are binary blobs.
Of course, awful drivers is interesting, considering an awful lot of smartphones are running the Linux kernel, and an awful lot of them have PowerVR chips powering them.
Yes I'm talking about Android... and PowerVR has been a staple in the ARM world for ages for decent 3D embedded graphics.
Then again, I suppose the big issue is how Intel adapted PowerVR for PCs - because they probably don't have PCIe interfaces. And perhaps the Windows driver was awful because they had to adapt the Windows CE one (which has significant differences in DirectX and Direct3D over desktop Windows). But as am embedded chip, it's pretty solid.
I had a quick google of AMD64 and it is just a bunch of extensions to x86. Its pretty much just more registers, everything extended from 32 to 64 bits and a new addressing mode. Mostly the same instructions. Good luck building an AMD64 CPU without an x86 license from Intel. Even if you could, good luck selling a CPU that can't run any software currently available
Exactly. I don't have the source code for the processor microcode either. I can live with it, provided the API exposed to the driver is sufficiently complete.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
No, that would be "not making it free." Open source does not have to be free, unless you want to charge to view the source instead of just to use it.
Not to mention the 15 or so mod points people have used on it too....
I'm not sure about that.. the architectures are so different that any optimizations made to the shader compiler would be useless to other designs.. hell, even different generations of chips require different optimizations.
Of course, awful drivers is interesting, considering an awful lot of smartphones are running the Linux kernel, and an awful lot of them have PowerVR chips powering them.
Sure. I was referring to the Intel GMA500, which I had the misfortune of dealing with. It was in a super-ruggedized toughbook. We had both Windows and Linux versions. The graphics drivers were not good on either, with Linux being much worse.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
well then, if you're talking about perception of value then the people who mine bitcoins obviously perceive the value of what they are doing to be higher than the value of the electricity consumed.
BTW, lots of people pay good money for worthless shit that they perceive to have value (largely because they're either stupid or easily manipulated by marketing or both) so arguments based on perceived value aren't very convincing.
well then, if you're talking about perception of value then the people who mine bitcoins obviously perceive the value of what they are doing to be higher than the value of the electricity consumed.
Except that BitCoins are a medium of exchange. They have no value other than the ability to exchange them for something else. It's like the number in your bank balance: you don't even have coins or notes that may become collectable. The value of the money in your bank account is defined by what it can buy for you, as is the value of BitCoins. Currently, however, I don't believe that there are any things that can be bought for BitCoins that can't be bought for less money than the cost of mining the BitCoins.
arguments based on perceived value aren't very convincing.
Since there is no absolute measure of value, perceived value is the only thing that we can talk about in this context. Value is inherently a subjective quality as it depends on your situation. The value of a cup of water to me is a lot less than the value of exactly the same cup to someone in the middle of a desert.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I could care less if they have a non-binary blob or not. I care about full OpenCL 1.x-2.x/OpenGL 4.x stack support for Linux. Taint the kernel all their want. I want solid drivers that just work.