Linux AMD rolling Linux driver! New Open SOurce Strategy!

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The RadeonHD driver has been released yesterday and it's being hosted on FreeDesktop.org. This new driver is the result of AMD's cooperation with Novell, supporting the Radeon HD 2000 (R600) group. Although it has a lot of improvements, there's still much work to be done.

The RadeonHD driver is mainly written by the Novell/SuSE team, and soon, AMD will release more documentation once the documents are checked by their legal department. Right now, the driver can't do too much stuff, being targeted only for developers and those who want to experiment if the driver works. If the documentation promised by AMD will be available soon, reverse engineering for the R500 and R600 series won't be needed.

Until a complete and stable version for 2D graphics is released, some months will pass, and after some time, the 3D will be available, but this could change depending on the number of persons from the X.Org community who will get involved in the project.

AMD has some great plans to expand its Linux assistance, using Catalyst 7.9, which will add support for Radeon HD 2000 and improves performance with approximately 90% in a number of games.

This could mean that the Linux gaming industry will soon grow, because right now, it's still underdeveloped and the community of Linux gamers is almost inexistent.

The developers are very enthusiastic about AMD's decision, and some consider AMD is making great efforts to help the Open Source community and are waiting for the complete and verified documentation with more source code for the 2D skeleton driver, Avivo library etc. This open source driver is considered a good rival for NVIDIA's proprietary drivers. This could lead to other graphics cards producers creating open source drivers and documentation for their video cards, a very important step in the betterment of the Linux distributions.

Source ; [Phoronix] ATI/AMD's New Open-Source Strategy Explained
 
Amd is taking the transition from deep and covering all tracks as much as possible. Now intel will try to steal amd's hardwork.
 
AMD always creates, Intel's know how to hire AMD's Top Engineers, use AMDs Backbone Technology to create better processors.
 
2008 will be a good year when it comes to dispaly cards. We will see a three way battle between AMD, Intel and Nvidia. Intel already has open sourced its graphics drivers and now AMD. Have to wait and see what Nvidia does.

In terms of performance on Linux, I think AMD has improved a lot with the new catalyst driver and maybe in a year the OSS driver will improve a lot with 3D capability added.
 
When tis was announced , i was too sceptical.But after seeing the datasheets I am a bit more happy.Though the info given by AMD is just tip of the iceberg this is never te less a promising start.Currently only the framebuffer driver and may be a bit of 2D drawing to he buffer can be done with the info provided.
I am wanting for more deatiled specs on the 2D accelerator and Video encoders to be released , then I would buy some HD cards and start programming in my leisure time :) .
 
nvidia doesn't need an open source driver for Linux, they have great Linux support for 2d and 3d in their current drivers... this is really part of the problem for ATI (AMD)as they have never had anything but really shi@%ty Linux support......it's about time they wised up to this :) This will be a real improvement......

However... I would still love to see an nvidia ppc ps3 Linux driver :(

meanwhile... I am not sure what this could do for gaming since there are not a lot of well supported games now... yet we already have good 3d support for nvidia, so how is this going to change gaming when it hasn't gone very far anyway.
 
PiXeLpUsHeR said:
nvidia doesn't need an open source driver for Linux, they have great Linux support for 2d and 3d in their current drivers... this is really part of the problem for ATI (AMD)as they have never had anything but really shi@%ty Linux support......it's about time they wised up to this :) This will be a real improvement......
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Yes Nidia's linux support is quite good.But I am not interested in the driver per se.I am more interested in the specs of the cards being released.I have been doing linux drivers ( more specifically X and DirectFb drivers) and a bit of direct show drivers for some time now and would love to get an opportunity to fiddle around with a RV630 core.:)
 
What docs they have released are only enough to write a framebuffer driver with some preliminary drawing to the framebuffer.I am waiting for more specs on the 2D engine,3D engine,UVD...etc from which things will really get interesting.
 
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