On Monday 01 February 2010 22:58:13 Bruno Wolff III wrote: > And look what just came out today: > http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nzk0Ng OH, WOW! :-D I was just about to opt-out of the discussion because it is getting more and more philosophical, but *this* text... This text is *way* too good to be skipped! Did you actually read it through? Let me sum up the highlights (quoting, skipping irrelevant details and putting some of my own comments in square brackets --- sorry, couldn't resist... ;-) ): ------------ Months after the ATI Radeon HD 5000 series ... was introduced, AMD has finally pushed out the first bits of open-source code... [Yeah, after some months, finally!!] The ATI kernel mode-setting support that we really care about ... isn't yet published. The open-source ATI driver currently offers no 2D ... and the 3D support ... also is not yet available. [So this driver is actually the vesa driver, right?] The DDX driver supports mode-setting ... while the DisplayPort connectivity is still not working right... [Nah, who cares about that...] These new AMD graphics cards have been around since September while there was no open-source support at that time. [So it's been like, 5 months now?] In December ... there was Evergreen Shader documentation that was made publicly available and around that time it was confirmed ... that initial VGA mode-setting was working ... on unreleased code. [Oh, bummer, unreleased.] ... The revised target was to publish this code by FOSDEM, which is this weekend so AMD did hit the target this time. [I bet some PR manager at ATI is going to get a bonus for half-a- year delay in development, just to hit it between the eyes on FOSDEM, with so much media coverage...] Ideally we can see the ... kernel mode-setting support land in time for the Linux 2.6.34 kernel merge window that should be opening up next month. [What, no KMS on FOSDEM?] At this time there is no Radeon HD 5000 series support via hard-coded paths or AtomBIOS with the xf86-video-radeonhd driver, nor do we know if any support will ever come. [Man, I get a feeling that the author of this text loves ATI just as much as I do... :-) ] For those interested in the Radeon HD 5000 series and the Catalyst Linux driver [But, but... This is closed source!!! That's sacrilege!!!], which has been supported since the first Evergreen GPUs were introduced, we have benchmarks of the Radeon HD 5750 and Radeon HD 5770. Logs of the chatter surrounding the open-source ... can be found at RadeonHD.org... [Oh, I so love to chatter about open source with Catalyst developers...] The PCI IDs ... support includes the desktop and mobile GPUs ... along with some unreleased ASICs. ... The xf86-video-ati patches to support these new ATI graphics processors is currently several hundred lines of code without any acceleration support. [Yeah, who needs acceleration these days, really? We're all so over it...] The introduced patches (driver log) update AtomBIOS, add AtomBIOS support for the new digital output setup on Evergreen, LUT support, hardware cursor support, and CRTC/PLL updates. Now we just need to wait for 2D and 3D acceleration support along with KMS, which fortunately is right out on the horizon or so it seems. [Or so it seems! You gotta love this guy, this text is awesome!] We're also waiting to find out what other sort of hardware documentation will be released ... [One who waits long enough, finds out eventually... Umm... Oh, those damn proverbs...] The ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 (R600/700) graphics processors are what up to this point have been the biggest focus among open-source driver developers, which now has proper kernel mode-setting support and 3D acceleration via Mesa. The Radeon X1000 (R500) support is basically 2D/3D complete at this time as with the much older ATI Radeon hardware, which now is in the process of migrating to a Gallium3D stack. [Yeah!!! Those proud R500 owners!! Their hardware finally Just Works, after all these years...] ------------ Folks, what can I say? ATI support is so awesome that I have no business here criticizing them. Just read this review from a real *pro*, the original is on the quoted link above! ;-) Enjoy! :-D Best, :-) Marko -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
