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AMD Releases UVD Engine Source Code
An anonymous reader writes "Years of desire by AMD Linux users to have open source video playback support by their graphics driver is now over. AMD has released open-source UVD support for their Linux driver so users can have hardware-accelerated video playback of H.264, VC-1, and MPEG video formats. UVD support on years old graphics cards was delayed because AMD feared open-source support could kill their Digital Rights Management abilities for other platforms."
It makes the AMD platform much more appealing for low power media boxes.
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Because you can't give away somebody else's IP without getting sued and possibly having your chips blacklisted? For those that don't know HDCP is property of Intel which means AMD had to sign a license agreement and NDA to allow their systems to support HDCP. Of course this gives Intel two advantages when it comes to their drivers, one they don't have to worry about IP since they own it and two because they've been ahead of AMD both on IPC and die shrinks they were able to keep HDCP pretty much a separate module in the designs VS AMD who used parts of their GPU for HDCP which is why they had to be VERY careful not to step into the IP minefield when they went about opening their chips.
Now personally i think it sucks balls that we ALL have to pay for this DRM being baked into the chips when so few of us are watching content protected by HDCP but as long as big media has a giant stiffie for DRM we are all just gonna have to accept it. I do hope this gets Linux users to put their money where their mouths are and support AMD, I don't know how many "LOL use Nvidia" posts I've seen from Linux users which you just have to be gobsmacked when you realize here is the guys that spend so much time talking about "freedom" while supporting the most FOSS unfriendly company there is. I mean there is a reason why Torvalds gave Nvidia the bird ya know, and it wasn't his way of saying they were #1. AMD has done every single thing the FOSS community asked, they are opening their chips, helping out with Coreboot support, they are probably one of the most FOSS friendly hardware companies there is so lets hope they see that support rewarded, otherwise companies are gonna look at the lack of support AMD got and decide that there is nothing to gain from being open.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Did AMD actually release any source as the title suggests? Where is it? Or did they just make using/redistributing their firmware legal?
There's three parts:
1. Microcode update (not open source, never was)
2. Kernel patches (open source)
3. Mesa patches (open source)
The first post leads to an email, but if you go to thread mode you'll see 10 kernel patches following it and the mesa patches are in the other link in the Phoronix article. This is a real open source driver, as open source as the rest of their driver. I must honestly say I'd given up hope that this would ever get released, but fantastic that it has. This has literally been years in the works, but now that the hurdles have been crossed hopefully this support is here to stay for future generations of cards as well.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The question is - the driver (the part that Linux runs) is open sourced. It just interfaces with parts that aren't (the firmware).
A modern graphics card is programmable - they run various programs (and you know them for doing stuff like GPGPU and CUDA, and even LLVM). So the firmware files are there to load the hardware decoder blocks onto the GPU.
For AMD cards, the card does the whole video decode chain - you feed it in h.264 or VC-1, and it parses the stream, decodes it and renders it all on the chip. nVidia cards require CPU assistance - they do the IDCTs and YUV transforms and other acceleration, but not the entire stream on card.
So they open-sourced the part your CPU runs, while the GPU part is still a binary blob that the driver loads onto the GPU so it can start feeding it the encoded stream and have the GPU decode and display it.
There's not much else to it - they could open source the firmware, but that's often highly proprietary and may contain licensed code from elsewhere. Plus, there may be a bunch of other technologies involved (i.e. the compiler) that they can't open-source. And most people won't have use for that code anyhow - it's firmware. It's just like the firmware that runs your WiFi card, your NIC, etc. - they often make the interface public and leave the rest of it proprietary.
HDCP was not the issue here, that is the link between the DVI/HDMI port and the monitor. This was about AACS/CSS that is used by BluRay/DVD and the Windows DRM requirements, under the license agreements AMD must protect the video between it is sent to the binary driver as compressed video and is output through the DVI/HDMI port as decoded video. By exposing the hardware API they feared you may be able to snoop on the binary driver on Windows and intercept protected data, worst case it couldn't be fixed in software and AMD would lose all their certifications, all licensed software would update to refuse to play on AMD hardware and it couldn't be used by OEMs that want the "Made for Windows" stickers plus some incredibly ugly contract penalties. So yeah DRM, but not that DRM.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Nope, no source code. Just binary blobbage.
Then what the hell is all this:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2013-April/037049.html
The AMD Fusion boards come with 1.6GHz (Atom-equivalent) processors and integrated Radeons. They can't handle 1080p on the CPU, but can on the GPU. They're low power, so are good choices for home cinema boxes.
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