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Cherry on Linux
John Cherry is a long-time Linux advocate dedicated to facilitating the adoption of Linux in various markets. John has held positions with the OSDL and Linux Foundation.
ATI - opening up to Linux?
September 5, 2007 |
During the state of the Linux round-table discussion on the first day of the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, James Bottomley (Linux kernel developer) had asked the panelists what are the top two things each panelist would like from the Linux community. Among the panelists was Google’s Chris DiBona, who is the open-source program manager at Google. His response was interesting when he had said the following: “I would love to get either NVIDIA and ATI to actually give us the specs on the drivers we want or let’s just reverse engineer everything and do it ourselves.”
It looks like AMD may be making good on a promise made at the Red Hat Summit in May. AMD is working with the community to release a 2D-accelerated Linux graphics driver, with 3D acceleration being part of the future plans. The official AMD press release states: “In the coming months AMD also plans to accelerate efforts to address the needs of the open source community as well.” But what does this mean? Are they opening up the fglrx driver? Are they providing specifications? Are they just making a better binary blob so the open-source community will just want reverse engineer it more?
“As client computing on Linux continues to grow so has our support and focus on delivering best-in-class performance and compatibility for our products,” said Ben Bar-Haim, vice president of software, Graphics Product Group at AMD. “In the second half of 2007 we plan to deliver the most significant enhancements for ATI Radeon graphics ever for Linux and reaffirm our commitment to consumer users and the community as a whole.”
With companies like Dell and Google encouraging AMD/ATI to offer open source 2D and 3D graphics drivers, it looks like there is finally enough pull in the market to make it happen!
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In a follow-on announcement (http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/95589), AMD says it will be providing developers with information on the programming of open-source graphics drivers for the company’s two new graphics chip families in addition to actively supporting the development of such a driver.
The word is that AMD will itself be programming the basics of an open-source driver for the two recent graphics chip generations (R500 and R600, i.e. X1300 to HD 2900) and then collaborating on its further development with the open-source community. AMD will not only be providing interested developers with a streamlined version of documentation, as it did with x9500-x800 graphics chips. Instead, the information provided will reportedly allow a driver to be written that will address all of the graphics chip’s functions, including 3-D capabilities. Blizzard says that this step puts AMD In an even better light than Intel, which has repeatedly been praised for its open-source drivers, though it does not provide independent developers with any documentation for its graphics chips.
In the next few months, AMD will then be coming up with another new version that will finally support AIGLX, enabling 3-D effects with Compiz on the Linux desktop even without Xgl. In its press release on the new drivers, AMD had already indicated that it would be expanding its commitment to open source over the next few months, but the details that have now been revealed were not included in the press release.
This is excellent news.
Look forward to more information being shared about NVIDIA nForce and GeForce controller specs.
OpenSource 2D and 3D graphics drivers will make Linux desktop value proposition more compelling than ever for the Gaming community.
All the best.
thanks
Saifi Khan.
TWINCLING Society, Hyderabad AP India.
freedom of innovation
http://www.twincling.org/