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

Re:DRM in Linux?

[NotBorg]

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

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.

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: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".