RadeonHD.org contains IRC chat logs for the #radeon and #radeonhd channels at FreeNode. More features are coming soon at RadeonHD.org. This web-site was established on November 19, 2007 and is currently considered beta. The IRC logging mechanism written is considered a work in progress, but expect more features in the near future.
The RadeonHD (xf86-video-radeonhd) driver is designed for the ATI "R500" Radeon X1000 series and newer graphics processors. The driver is open-source and written by Novell with specifications provided to the public by AMD. Currently this support does extend to the "R600" Radeon HD 2000/3800 series. While the driver supports RandR 1.2 and other basic functionality, it is very much a work in progress. The RadeonHD driver was publicly announced in September of 2007.
For more information on the current status of the RadeonHD driver, check out the Phoronix coverage.
The open-source Radeon driver supports earlier ATI graphics processors including the R100, R200, R300, and R400 series. There is also initial work for the R500 and R600 series support.
There was a talk last week at LinuxTag in Berlin by Egbert Eich about kernel mode-setting and the DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) graphics stack on Linux. Egbert is, of course, a long-time X developer and openSUSE developer at Novell who was one of the masterminds behind the RadeonHD graphics driver and has worked on various pieces of X over the years. In Egbert's brief KMS talk he briefly covered the history of the Linux graphics stack, the user and kernel-space APIs for DRM mode-setting, and related topics. For those that missed out on his talk, below are his slides.
Earlier this week we reported that Novell was finally dropped the RadeonHD driver from openSUSE as they switch to using the xf86-video-ati driver with kernel mode-setting (KMS) support over using their in-house R500/600/700 driver they had developed as part of AMD's initial open-source strategy for Linux. Whenever bringing up the RadeonHD driver at Phoronix it generally leads to a heated discussion in our forums between community members, developers, and other representatives over the history of the RadeonHD driver and what really was its purpose, among other dissenting views. In this most recent discussion, Luc Verhaegen who formerly worked for Novell and was one of the few Novell engineers that worked heavily on the xf86-video-radeonhd driver from the beginning, made several more claims...
Since being let go by Novell last year where he worked on the RadeonHD Linux graphics driver and X.Org support within SuSE Linux, Luc Verhaegen has continued work on his VIA Unichrome DDX driver as well as other X.Org code and he has also become involved with the CoreBoot project that aims to create a free software BIOS for most chipsets and motherboards on the market. Luc has worked on support for flashing the BIOS on ATI graphics cards, native VGA text mode support, and other work to help the CoreBoot project. Today at FOSDEM in Brussels, Luc Verhaegen is about to give a talk on reverse engineering a motherboard BIOS.
Just this morning we were talking about the lack of activity within the RadeonHD and Nouveau drivers, but as luck would have it, this afternoon the xf86-video-radeonhd 1.3.0 driver has been released. This is the first RadeonHD driver release since April. Among the new features in the RadeonHD 1.3.0 driver include support for HDMI audio with the RS690 and R700 ASICs, basic power management support, EXA acceleration is enabled by default, fixed back-light handling, overhauled cursor handling, many bug fixes, and the start of some developer's documentation...
While we just shared that there are now patches available that introduce HDMI audio support for the xf86-video-ati driver, the RadeonHD driver has picked up improvements for power management, an area where previously the xf86-video-ati driver was in a better position. Novell's Matthias Hopf added some power management support for an area of the AtomBIOS that he had reverse engineered, after AMD hadn't provided any public documentation on the matter. With this new power management code, the xf86-video-radeonhd driver will attempt to read voltage and clock information from the AtomBIOS and then try to figure out the different combinations of voltages and frequencies that will work without leaving the card in a non-functioning state...
While the xf86-video-ati driver continues to churn along receiving new code and frequent releases, there has not been too much to report on with the xf86-video-radeonhd driver lately. There was the RadeonHD 1.2.5 release over a month ago, but not a lot of interesting commits can be found in the RadeonHD driver over the past few weeks and these Novell developers suffered in recent layoffs...
The RadeonHD 1.2.4 driver was released back in December and since then a lot of work has went into this open-source driver through the partnership between AMD and Novell. Over the past few months they have made significant process, but also faced some setbacks, like losing a key X developer...
Yesterday we broke the news that AMD will stop supporting the R300-500 GPUs in the Catalyst driver. There have been well over one hundred posts in the Phoronix Forums from ATI customers upset with this decision, but fortunately, there is first-rate open-source support available. AMD continues to release documentation and code while the X.Org development community has been hard at work on the xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-radeonhd drivers along with Mesa and Gallium3D components. The main problem though is the open-source stack -- at this time -- providing poor gaming performance, but power management can also be a problem. In yesterday's article we provided some R500 comparative 2D and OpenGL benchmarks, but in this article are some power management results comparing the Catalyst 9.2 driver to the xf86-video-ati driver.
Beginning next month with the Catalyst 9.4 release, support for the R300/400/500 generations of graphics processors will be dropped from AMD's mainline ATI driver. In a move they hope will allow them to focus their efforts on newer and upcoming graphics processors, the mainline Catalyst driver on both Linux and Windows will stop supporting cards older than the Radeon HD 2000 series. Linux customers affected will be encouraged to use their open-source driver stack (xf86-video-ati or xf86-video-radeonhd and Mesa) or stay with the Catalyst 9.3 driver.
Due to the tough economic conditions around the world, Novell last month began slashing some of their workforce. With that reduction, a good percentage of the paid OpenSuSE developers were laid off...