AMD Releases Register Specs For R5xx And R6xx

ianare writes "AMD has recently released register specifications for the ATI Radeon R5xx and R6xx graphic devices. This will (theoretically) allow the OSS community to develop drivers, given time. In fact, engineers from Novell have released a first alpha quality Open Source driver which currently supports initial mode settings. Although current work is focused on 2D, rather than 3D acceleration, this type of information sharing could conceivably lead to an OSS 3D driver."

Old files?

[caluml]

These files are 12 days old. Aren't these the same files that were released sometime last week?

Re:glxGears needs to be updated!

[Drinking Bleach]

Funny, but glxgears was never a real benchmark.

Sorry, I RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

And it appears that the real news is the alpha-quality, open-source driver. There doesn't appear to be any release of specs other than those done around the time of the previous announcement.

Oh, it's a "Zonk" story ... *shakes head*.

Novell's engineer started earlier

[renoX]

Note that the reason why Novell's engineer were able to deliver an alpha driver this week is because they had access to the ATI's specification under NDA since two month.

So the driver isn't the result of only one week of work, even if it's still in an alpha state.

Re:These documents are not as exciting as you thin

[AntiDragon]

If I remember correctly, AMD have stated that there is more to come - the specs and documentation covering the 3D functions has been promised for the "near future". The reason for the delay is due to patents and third party code in those areas and have had to take greater care to make sure the specs and docs aren't encumbered. I hope they follow through on this.

R300 opensource drivers

[DrYak]

Note that the opensource drivers are only available in the recent releases on most distros. Some not so-recent releases did disable the R300 driver because it wasn't deemed stable enough (opensuse 10.0 come to mind).

So either the GP poster will have to update to a more recent release of his favorite distro (latest Ubuntu FF and openSUSE 10.2 have it enabled by default. I don't know about the others distro).

Or if he wants to keep his current installation for some reasons, he has to get the latest DRM (kernel drivers) [freedesktop.org] and recompile them along with the Mesa3D library that corresponds to his X.org server.
(Note that older versions of Mesa3D are sensitive to versions of Xorg. If you start getting a lots of errors about undeclared stuff when compiling or missing functions at link time, then try to recompile a Mesa release with the same major and middle numbers as the one from your distro - i.e.: keep 6.5.x or 6.4.x depending on your Xorg).

If you read the instruction on Freedesktop linked above, it's not difficult at all.

Absolutley _Spot On_

[burnttoy]

I develop drivers for a living (actually for the last year I haven't). I went through the docs a few weeks ago - I spent about 2 hours having a "good" read.

These docs will let one do the following

1 - Setup you own video mode
2 - Setup up a video overlay (not video acceleration)
3 - Setup a full colour mouse cursor

That's all. These do not explain how to blit, alpha blend, scale, ROP2, ROP3 or ROP4 or perform any other transform.

This is useful, but not _that_ useful!

Hopefully there will be more to come specifically more on the memory/cache controller (essential to get performance up), more on the PCI/AGP bus control, more on the 2D source/dest blit registers, pitch, loop counters and I'd like to know how much of the 2D guts is programmable. TBH I thought we'd have moved on to the point of (somewhat) programmable shaders for 2D these days with loops etc built into the HW (0 clock loops and addressing etc).

Re:Promises mean nothing

[Ford Prefect]

Those specifications, promised nearly ten years ago, never arrived to my knowledge. If they ever did, it happened long after the G200 was obsolete.

They did arrive, and for the G400 as well. The first driver to make use of this information was the Utah-GLX [sourceforge.net] module thingy for XFree86 3 - that John Carmack helped with their development. I think the specifications for some particular, programmable section of the cards (WARP setup engine?) weren't released, but microcode blobs for the necessary functionality were.

I think the G200/G400 were among the first to be supported in whatever the 'proper', non-hacky drivers for XFree86 4 were called, but from my experience with a G400, the open-source 3D drivers weren't always that stable.

I moved on to Nvidia after that too - stable closed-source drivers for Linux were much nicer than unstable, open-source ones...