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."

Comments

Llano: 3.3?

[whoever57]

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).

Re:Llano: 3.3?

[wirelessduck]

There's still a problem with Llano VGA in Linux 3.3. These bug reports seem to indicate that the problem lies with the DP to VGA bridge not working. As a workaround, you can use a HDMI/DVI connection instead of VGA.

AMD needs to focus on OS

[aztektum]

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.

Re:AMD needs to focus on OS

[master5o1]

Lagging support such as nVidia Optimus not being supported on Linux platforms.

Re:AMD needs to focus on OS

[Anonymous Coward]

nVidia's linux support has been solid for, like, a decade. Their blob works so damn well, and has worked well for so damn long, that even if the Magical Code Fairy came and blessed AMD/ATI with perfect *NIX modules, I would be hard-pressed to give up on nVidia. I'm all fidgety, waiting for the nearly-released 600-series cards, and you can totally bet those cards will have first-rate blob support, for us early adopters of the linux persuasion.
Buy a relatively new ATI card, and really, you just hope to Christ that at least the vesa driver works in X, so you can spend the next 10 or 15 hours trying to get the thing semi-functional.
Plug in the nVidia card, run the module installer, and start up X. It is that easy. ATI should supply firey hoops & circus music with each boxed video card, just to make the installation experience more realistic. Giving open source coders more information to work with will help, but if they want something as awesome/trivial as nVidia's experience, they're going to need a whole new way of doing things. Either give the open source community *everything* it needs, or hire competent people to get the job done properly. It's been a 2-bit effort out of AMD for far too long. Honestly, I don't even consider them for Win machines any more, because I know that the card I choose today will eventually pass through a Lin machine, after another upgrade.

Re:AMD needs to focus on OS

[Asic Eng]

Isn't that problem solved by the bumblebee project?

Re:DRM in Linux?

[NotBorg]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager not http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management

They still have a non-free dependency; go /w Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Bitcoins

[geekd]

Judging from the average hashrate, there are more than 5 of us. :)

Re:They still have a non-free dependency; go /w In

[dmitrygr]

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

Re:They still have a non-free dependency; go /w In

[viperidaenz]

Yes, like all the new Atom cpu's

Re:WOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

[Skapare]

I'm still waiting for 4D.

Re:They still have a non-free dependency; go /w In

[bzipitidoo]

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.

Re:They still have a non-free dependency; go /w In

[Daniel Phillips]

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.

Re:Bitcoins

[Dagger2]

Thanks for completely misunderstanding Bitcoin.

Re:They still have a non-free dependency; go /w In

[Kjella]

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".

Re:With their fabs all sold...

[unixisc]

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.

Re:What the hell is a DCE6 display watermark?

[Kjella]

Well my understanding of the patch is sketchy, but DCE6 is just the display controller chip and watermark in this context seem to be nothing but frame begin/end indicators or timings depending on number of pixels to draw, latency, display clock etc. so you'll get a picture on screen and the display buffer is updated at the right time. It certainly has nothing to do with watermarks in the cinavia sense.

Previous series?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Bitcoins

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:WOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

[Jappus]

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. ;-)

How convenient

[elwin_windleaf]

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.