On Fri, 22 Nov 2002, Dave Reed wrote: >http://mirror.ati.com/companyinfo/press/2002/4574.html > >http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=6345 > >I couldn't find source code - does anyone know if they plan to release >the source code for their drivers? The above drivers are ATI's proprietary drivers for XFree86. Originally, ATI produced proprietary drivers for their FireGL hardware. When the FireGL 8800 came out, they produced proprietary drivers for that as well. These are very high end boards that are very expensive, and not mainstream. At some point ATI decided that they would also tweak the drivers to work with the Radeon 8500 as well, since it is for the most part just a slower version of the FireGL 8800. While ATI was in the testing phase of testing the 8500 out with the FireGL drivers, someone else found out that the drivers worked with the 8500 too, and people posted to various lists that the FireGL drivers magically worked with the 8500 (like they were pulling one over on ATI, when in reality, ATI purposefully was working on supporting the 8500, but just hadn't announced it officially yet). Recently, ATI made an official announcement of Radeon 8500 support in their drivers, and this latest announcement is just a newer driver version which also supports their newer Radeon 9x00 hardware as well. These drivers are closed source, and most likely will remain that way, as they are merely provided to people mostly due to lots of people requesting it. ATI does however support open source as well, and contributes new open source 2D driver support for all of their new hardware to the XFree86 project very frequently. They also help developers such as myself, the DRI project, XFree86, GATOS and others by providing documentation to certain individuals, and in some cases providing sample hardware for open source development. ATI just sent patches to XFree86.org this week for example to add support for the Radeon 9500 chips, and fix many bugs, improve monitor detection and many other things. The DRI project is currently in the midst of completing open source Radeon 8500 3D support as well. This open source development would not have been possible without the help of ATI providing documentation, etc. to the DRI project. There is currently to my knowledge no project underway to implement open source support for Radeon 9x00 hardware, however it could be that it is being started quietly (as the 8500 support was), or it might be something that occurs sometime down the road. In general, open source support for new hardware like this is kept quiet until it reaches the state where it is remotely ready to be seen by the unwashed masses. Most developers I believe by now know if they acknowledge they are working on something, that they will be endlessly bombed with email and other communication daily asking if they can test things, asking if the code is ready, asking why it is not public, etc... In short, if you want to keep up to date with what hardware is supported by DRI with open source drivers, you might want to join the dri-devel mailing list. Judging by how long it will have taken to get Radeon 8500 support once it is released in an official XFree86 release, I believe it is fairly good assumption that it will take that long or longer to see open source 3D drivers for Radeon 9x00 as well. >This may motivate me to replace my Radeon 7500 with a 9700 (now >I can tell my wife what I want for Christmas :-) If you want open source 3D support, or want working 3D out of the box, right now the best card for 3D is the Radeon 7500. When XFree86 4.3.0 is released, if all goes well, then the Radeon 8500 will fill that place. Radeon 9x00 hardware will have only closed source drivers for the immediate future. The difference now though, is that ATI is providing their customers with their drivers they've traditionally kept for their high end workstation customers, at least until open source drivers may appear. Hope this helps answer your questions. Take care, TTYL -- Mike A. Harris ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris OS Systems Engineer XFree86 maintainer Red Hat Inc. _______________________________________________ xfree86-list mailing list xfree86-list@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/xfree86-list IRC: #xfree86 on irc.redhat.com
