Preliminary opensource driver for the ATI R500-based cards

Submitted by admin on Tue, 2007-06-12 23:51

Jerome Glisse announced today that a small team of X.Org developers has managed to provide the initial support for ATI R500-based cards (ATI Radeon X1300 up to X1600 at the time) by reverse engineering. The released code is definitely not yet ready for the normal users, but it's the big step ahead nevertheless. Especially having in mind how ATI (now owned by AMD) has not provided specifications of their hardware to the open source community. Jerome writes:

"Over the past couple of months, a small group of people has been working on reverse engineering the r500-based AMD video cards. Everyone involved worked on this in whatever free time they had, which is why this has taken so long.

The code released today is able to initialise and set video modes on rv515 and rv530 (X1300 up to X1600); we still lack proper initialisation for r520 & r580 (X1800 and above, some X1600) because of lack of time and hardware.

The Xorg driver was put together by Daniel Stone who also did a lot of the initial reverse engineering, Matthew Garrett who provided helpful assistance on the driver and feedback, Kyle McMartin who cheered us up and provided insightful comments, Oliver McFadden who also helped in testing the driver, and Jérôme Glisse who did the rest of the reverse engineering and driver work. We are also, of course, very thankful to the X.Org, DRI and Mesa communities (which in fact is the same community with different names), who provided help to the few of us who did not have a whole good understanding of everything involved in mode setting."

He finished with some strong words that are impossible to disagree with:

"I would like to take advantage of this announcement to stress that AMD hurt its consumers by not providing specifications of their hardware to the open source community which end up in providing a bad experience to them.

So, AMD, please be respectful of the community and at least give a detailed motivations and reasons for not providing your graphics hardware specifications. I look forward to the day when the open source community will be able to work with AMD for providing to AMD's consumers the best experiences with their hardware on any open source operating systems."