News ATI drivers

[Dotan Cohen]

On 06/09/07, Richard Lamont <richard at lamont.me.uk> wrote:
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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."
>

TFA is full of contradictions. I'll point out the obvious: "... will
soon be a distant memory"

I'll take this opportunity to a jerk and mention that I'm more than
pleased with my Duo Core 2. It's my first Intel processor in years.
Anyone want to guess why I stopped buying AMD?

Dotan Cohen

http://what-is-what.com
http://gibberish.co.il

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