AMD Releases Register Specs For R5xx And R6xx 121
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."
Re:Hurrah (Score:5, Insightful)
And even the alpha driver is old news (Score:1, Insightful)
Yep, it's a Zonk story
About time! (Score:4, Insightful)
But I think ATI made a smart move. Outsourcing driver development to the OSS community certainly cuts costs.
Re:drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
These documents are not as exciting as you think (Score:5, Insightful)
Whilst the registers are essential for getting any kind of driver to work, the documents don't describe the exciting features of the graphics processor. They give you enough control over the memory-controller timings to convert any Radeon card into a smoking brick with a small kernel-mode driver, but they don't give instructions which actually make the graphics silicon do things. There's no indication of what the machine-code for the vector processors looks like.
If you compare this to the documentation that Intel has for its (obsolete) 845 graphics controller, you notice that the whole block of registers for controlling even something as basic as the blitter, let alone the 'set instruction pointer for processing unit N' registers which actually let you set the high-performance processing units in the card to work, are missing.
These documents let you use an R500 or R600 card as a frame buffer. Not worth making a song and dance about that one.
Myself, I'd be fascinated to see documentation for the Intel G965 like the documentation for the G845; it clearly exists, there's a paper in the most recent Intel Technical Journal about low-level programming on the 965, it's just not available to mortals unless by attempting to reverse-engineer the x.org 965 driver.
Re:Bad move? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bad move? (Score:4, Insightful)
Professional customers might still want a HW-developer-written driver.
Regardless of that, it's a better move than keeping the specs secret. Because in the latter case, you're totally at the mercy of the HW developer as far as driver availability and quality goes.
Re:drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bad move? (Score:3, Insightful)
Hardware makers do their thing and then they should pass the necessary info to the community so we can write the drivers.
Hey, make your own drivers! (Score:0, Insightful)
Why does it have to boil down to some volunteers to create a driver for a multi-billion dollar company for free, instead of said company creating and releasing their own drivers?
I'm not trolling, I'm being serious.
I don't get why the OSS community is rolling over and making these drivers. While I am aware this will make ATI drivers a lot more stable, I don't see why nVidia can create their own drivers but AMD/ATI can't.
What is to stop other companies from just not bothering to create linux drivers and instead release the specs and let the community do the work, saving them money and making sure that any support issues are "not their responsibility"?
Just keep buying nVidia cards to be honest. At least they actually bother to create drivers, instead of outsourcing them and then be able to deny any responsibility or support.
Re:drivers (Score:3, Insightful)
What's wrong with that? (Score:4, Insightful)
The only losers are the companies (eg. nvidia) that compete with companies clever enough to do this, and companies (eg. microsoft) who have a vested interest in there not being any Free Software drivers.
You say that... (Score:2, Insightful)
Writing drivers for 3D cards is difficult work. "Release the specs and we'll write the drivers" has been the mantra of the open source community for years, but I think we're all in for a disappointment if we're expecting feature-complete, high-performance open-source drivers for these cards any time soon.
I think some kind of sponsorship to dedicated, full-time devolopers is going to be necessary if we want to see drivers that can compete with even ATI's crappy binary drivers. Otherwise I'll bet the hardware will be long obsolete before the drivers are complete.
Re:Bad move? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is something we've been begging for! (Score:1, Insightful)
Money? Talent? Time?
> I don't get why the OSS community is rolling over and making these drivers.
We've only been begging for specs like these since forever, and we want lots more. Did you miss the whole story about the kernel team offering free drivers given sufficient specifications? If they make the driver, it'll almost have to be closed source, and then it won't be maintainable, so future kernels won't be able to use the hardware, etc.
This isn't a "concession" on the OSS side, it's a dream come true.
Re:Bad move? (Score:4, Insightful)
Look at the resources the r300 and nouveau projects have. If the manufacturers simply dumped the specs on them, they would be able to produce high quality drivers quickly. Even without the specs, they've proven their abilities to make decent drivers the hard way. Or do you have some reason to believe that they wouldn't be significantly more productive with specs? Is there something magic about ATI's programmers that makes them vastly more productive with the same specs to work from?
Re:Hurrah (Score:3, Insightful)
Opening the source hasn't got much to do with gaming success. The so-called succesful platforms, Windows and all the game consoles, are closed. Linux gaming could be pretty good right now, with NVidia's drivers for example. Opening the source will hardly make things less geeky, more attractive, or easier for the masses.
Quite another thing is your definition of success. For me, Linux has been a major success since 1999, and I hope I'd have discovered it even earlier. I'm not very interested in games, so it's not a factor of success IMHO. It's the same issue with 'being ready for the desktop', it depends on what you do, so you should never generalize (except in this sentence ;)
Re:R250 (Score:3, Insightful)
Even then you top video card is only a 6600GT. Not even a 7 series. You are not a high profit demographic but even then they will win you over if they get a good FOSS driver out for the current cards.
I'd rather have them contribute (Score:3, Insightful)