AMD's X.Org Linux driver for OSS developers

BANGALORE: AMD has announced the release of  X.Org driver for ATI R500/R600 graphics cards. Called "RadeonHD", it is targeted at developers and testers to begin with. With this not only is AMD providing the open source community with their ATI GPU specifications, but they have also been partnering with Novell on the development of a new open-source display driver.

The new driver is available for download at FreeDesktop.org and the latest code can be checked out using git. The work is in progress on par with the open source R500 Avivo driver. However, this new driver does support the Radeon HD 2000 (R600) family.

For those who aren't familiar with using git or building drivers from source the new open source driver can be installed on Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon.

Like the Avivo driver, RadeonHD requires X server 1.3 or newer. Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn ships with X server 1.2 while Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon (to be released next month) ships with X server 1.3. Therefore, packages have to be either manually upgraded in Feisty Fawn against a Gutsy repository or check out Ubuntu 7.10. As of now, Ubuntu daily LiveCD has been installed. These installation steps are almost the same for all the Linux distribution.

The logical thing to do is to get the latest driver source-code. The RadeonHD driver is housed at FreeDesktop.org in git. Unless the requisite Ubuntu packages already have installed , some specific commands need to be executed. The command will install the needed packages for git and compile the RadeonHD driver from source. Unlike the Avivo driver, the RadeonHD driver doesn't yet depend upon libpciaccess and therefore the libpciaccess-dev package isn't yet needed but will be of use at some point in the future.

The RadeonHD driver is largely being written by Novell/SuSE using the same documentation that was released freely to the open-source community recently. Novell developers will continue contributing to the RadeonHD driver as well, a release says. The specifications available to the community so far are just register reference guides for the RV630 and M56, but AMD will be releasing additional documentation (including for 3D functionality) once the documents are sanitized and then cleared by their legal department.

At this point, the RadeonHD driver is specifically for the developers and those wanting to use the experimental driver whether it is due to problems using the fglrx driver on the system or just wishing to test out the driver to see if it works. As long as AMD sticks to its word on delivering the rest of their documentation, there will not be too much of reverse engineering to be done for the R500 and R600 series. However, the driver is still likely a few months away from a stable point for 2D users (perhaps on time for X.Org 7.4) and then the 3D work after that. Depending upon how many X.Org community members end up contributing and the rate at which AMD pushes out new documentation, the timeline will certainly change.

The availability today of the RadeonHD driver is certainly a step in the right direction, but there is much work left to be accomplished with this new open source ATI/AMD driver.