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.
While the xf86-video-ati driver continues to churn along receiving new code and frequent releases, there has not been too much to report on with the xf86-video-radeonhd driver lately. There was the RadeonHD 1.2.5 release over a month ago, but not a lot of interesting commits can be found in the RadeonHD driver over the past few weeks and these Novell developers suffered in recent layoffs...
The RadeonHD 1.2.4 driver was released back in December and since then a lot of work has went into this open-source driver through the partnership between AMD and Novell. Over the past few months they have made significant process, but also faced some setbacks, like losing a key X developer...
Yesterday we broke the news that AMD will stop supporting the R300-500 GPUs in the Catalyst driver. There have been well over one hundred posts in the Phoronix Forums from ATI customers upset with this decision, but fortunately, there is first-rate open-source support available. AMD continues to release documentation and code while the X.Org development community has been hard at work on the xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-radeonhd drivers along with Mesa and Gallium3D components. The main problem though is the open-source stack -- at this time -- providing poor gaming performance, but power management can also be a problem. In yesterday's article we provided some R500 comparative 2D and OpenGL benchmarks, but in this article are some power management results comparing the Catalyst 9.2 driver to the xf86-video-ati driver.
Beginning next month with the Catalyst 9.4 release, support for the R300/400/500 generations of graphics processors will be dropped from AMD's mainline ATI driver. In a move they hope will allow them to focus their efforts on newer and upcoming graphics processors, the mainline Catalyst driver on both Linux and Windows will stop supporting cards older than the Radeon HD 2000 series. Linux customers affected will be encouraged to use their open-source driver stack (xf86-video-ati or xf86-video-radeonhd and Mesa) or stay with the Catalyst 9.3 driver.
Due to the tough economic conditions around the world, Novell last month began slashing some of their workforce. With that reduction, a good percentage of the paid OpenSuSE developers were laid off...
Just a little more than a week after AMD openly released R600/700 GPU code to begin development of an open-source 3D driver for their ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 hardware, a disassembler and table dumper for their video BIOS abstraction layer has been released to developers. This tool called AtomDis was used early on in the development of the RadeonHD driver by Novell and is now being released under the GNU GPLv2 license to assist interested open-source developers or act as an instrument to those learning about graphics processor programming.
While the Novell developers responsible for the xf86-video-radeonhd driver have been busy working on OpenSuSE 11.1, we have managed to get a new driver point release before the end of the year. Matthias Hopf has this morning announced the availability of the RadeonHD 1.2.4 driver. Added since the RadeonHD 1.2.3 driver in October is HDMI audio support, support for the ATI RV710 and RV730 GPUs using DCE 3.2, rotation support, RandR 1.3 panning, and many acceleration and build fixes...
Egbert Eich has announced this morning on the RadeonHD mailing list that rotation support has been added to this open-source ATI R500+ driver. This is a feature requested by many to be able to rotate the screen using RandR with the xf86-video-radeonhd driver, which is now possible...
When reviewing the Radeon HD 4670 and Radeon HD 4550 we found neither solution to be open-source friendly. Due to changes between the RV770 that powers the Radeon HD 4800 series and the newer RV710 and RV730 GPUs, these graphics cards wouldn't cooperate with the xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-radeonhd drivers. The open-source drivers would only work with the ATI RV710/730 GPUs when using an analog D-Sub interface...
Last week new RadeonHD HDMI audio patches were released by an independent developer that allows the integrated audio processor on ATI R600+ graphics cards to be used over HDMI using the open-source RadeonHD driver (xf86-video-radeonhd). Today those patches have landed in the master branch of this X.Org driver...