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.
The RadeonHD DRM isn't yet in a usable state to end-users, but Matthias Hopf has pushed his latest RadeonHD work into his personal git tree. DRM is now able to initialize on an RS690 GPU, but DRI isn't working yet...
Just four days ago the RadeonHD 1.2.0 driver was released as the first xf86-video-radeonhd driver update in several months. The RadeonHD 1.2.0 driver added support for several new Radeon HD 3XXX GPUs, R500 2D XAA/EXA acceleration, and many other underlying changes...
It's been a long time in the making, but the xf86-video-radeonhd 1.2 driver has just been pushed out the door. RadeonHD 1.2 is the first new release for this open-source ATI R500/600 driver since December of last year. The RadeonHD 1.2 driver includes support for new AMD graphics processors, 2D XAA/EXA acceleration, and other changes.
Committed to the xf86-video-radeonhd git tree today have been 17 changes to this open-source ATI R500/600 graphics driver. AMong the changes are adding full support for the RS690 IGP family, support for interlaced modes, and better support for LVTMA TMDS macro control values...
For those using motherboards with the AMD RS690 IGP, the DDIA Digital Block is now supported by the RadeonHD (xf86-video-radeonhd) driver. DDIA is the second digital block on this IGP that came as a mystery to both AMD and the RadeonHD developers as they believed no motherboard vendors were actually using this block...
For Linux distribution vendors, right now is proving to be an awkward time for them as they decide which ATI driver will ship as the default choice in their spring distribution refresh. The problem used to be whether to ship a binary-only driver in the distribution in order to provide "out of the box" support for all available graphics hardware, but on the ATI/AMD side the software distributors are now facing the challenge of which open-source driver they should call the de facto standard. In this article we are briefly looking at the matter of the xf86-video-ati vs. xf86-video-radeonhd drivers, the highly political issue of AtomBIOS, and what some of the popular Linux distributions are deciding to use this spring.
Following a period of relative inactivity in the xf86-video-radeonhd git tree over the past few weeks, this afternoon Novell's Egbert Eich had pushed forward 55 changes to this open-source R500/600 driver. The AMD Radeon HD 3400 and 3600 series are now supported and there are a number of other significant changes. The RV620/635 mode-setting support has required the most significant work since the R500 series, since all output blocks have been altered due to the introduced DisplayPort capabilities. We have already tested out this latest code and were left with a positive impression.
For the past several weeks we have been referencing AMD's "tcore" in several of our articles, which is a user-space software suite that has been developed and used internally at ATI by engineers to work on various aspects of their binary drivers. Tcore is primarily used for testing prior to the availability of the actual silicon for their forthcoming graphics processors. John Bridgman and Alex Deucher have been working tediously to get this tcore source-code sanitized and cleared for public release, and finally they have reached this milestone. AMD has just published the first bits of open-source 3D programming documentation for ATI GPUs. This 3D programming documentation covers the R500 series and even goes back with information on the R300/400 series as well. The R600 3D programming guide will also be out soon. This information available today is what will foster the growth of open-source R500/600 3D support for the Radeon and RadeonHD drivers as well as R600 2D acceleration.
Since last September when AMD's new open-source strategy was unveiled, their xf86-video-radeonhd driver and NDA-free documentation efforts have largely been to improve its Linux customer base. However, with this open community enablement, it has also led to an improved ATI hardware status in Sun's Solaris Operating System. Introduced in Build 80 of OpenSolaris was the RadeonHD display driver and this R500/600 driver has now appeared in Solaris Express Developer Edition 1/08 and Project Indiana Preview 2.
From Revenge to stacks being called workspace areas in AMD's documentation was discussed today on the RadeonHD IRC channel. If you're interested in the latest development information on the RadeonHD driver and open-source AMD, the IRC channel is certainly worth monitoring...