Ethics is a county of England where the girls wear Eva Glass slippers
|
|
|
AMD releases open source Evergreen drivers
THE GRAPHICS SIDE of chip firm AMD has finally gotten around to releasing open source drivers for its ATI Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" family of GPUs.
Phoronix reports that the xf86-video-ati DDX driver branch has user-space mode-setting support for the Radeon HD 5000 series GPUs. The ATI kernel mode-setting support is nearly finished but has not been published.
The current open source ATI driver offers no 2D (EXA) acceleration and does not have 3D support through either a classic Mesa driver or Gallium3D, however.
The DDX driver supports mode-setting on the Evergreen/R800 series GPUs with VGA and DVI connectors. AMD's Alex Deucher who had written most of this code said that he had not gotten Displayport connectivity working right yet.
The cards themselves have been in the shops with since September. In December AMD released Evergreen Shader documentation that was made publicly available. There were even rumours that someone had got VGA mode-setting working with Evergreen within AMD but had not released the code.
Digital connector support has now been added, and it is starting to look like Evergreen kernel mode-setting support will come out at about the same time as the Linux 2.6.34 kernel merge. µ
Share this:
Share
@tygrus EXA is an acceleration architecture, one of many (XAA, UXA, NV's one, etc). Each have strengths and weaknesses, but the proprietary driver does have 2D acceleration.
The current closed source ATI driver offers no hardware 2D (EXA) acceleration so they can't open source what they haven't got.
I do not think it makes sense to avoid AMD or NV drivers because they are not open sourced. Why should I buy a high end video card and saddle it with 2nd rate drivers, or a not-hw-accellerated OpenGL, or worse yet the SVGA driver?
It makes sense at all. AMD does not have enough resources in driver's development to support wide range of products. Even, AMD did not provide unified laptop's drivers.
The more open source the merrier.