News ATI drivers

[Richard Lamont]

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Hal V. Engel wrote:
> On Wednesday 05 September 2007 11:02:32 Erik Andrén wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> Xavier Bestel wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> as everyone has probably seen already, AMD just publicly promised specs
>>> and a reference driver for all cards starting with R500. Great.
>> Source?
> 
> I was wondering the same thing.  Doing some googling I found:
> 
> http://lwn.net/Articles/248227/

There's a little more from the Kernel Summit on the paid-for version of
LWN today:

"AMD manager Chris Schlaeger was then challenged to "give us some good
news." According to Chris, Linux is very important to AMD; the company
believes that the Opteron processor would not have been anywhere near as
successful without Linux support. The company's future plans lead to an
interesting problem, though. The "Fusion" product line will feature a
central processor and a graphics processor on the same die. Continuing
to support free software on the CPU while keeping the GPU closed leads
to all sorts of contradictions; it's really not an option. So, to avoid
losing Linux support altogether, AMD has made an important decision.

"Starting with the R500 chipset and going forward, AMD will fully
support free drivers for all of its graphics processors. This support
will not take the form of a release of the current proprietary ATI
driver; that code is not considered to be something that anybody would
really want to look at. So there will be a clean start. AMD will release
specifications and a skeleton driver with the plan to have 2D support
working by the end of the year. The company is clearly hoping that the
community will do much of the work on the driver, but it also plans to
participate actively in the process. If AMD follows through - and there
is no real reason to believe that it will not - then driver problems for
AMD/ATI chipsets will soon be a distant memory."


- --
Richard Lamont                        http://www.lamont.me.uk/
<richard at lamont.me.uk>
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