RadeonHD Driver To Use AtomBIOS

[val-gaav]

the good question right now is...

Since the differences between radeonhd and radeon drivers start to disappear, shouldn't the both drivers just merge or agree that radeon is for chips up to r400 and radeonhd for r500+ ? radeon driver already has ATOM bios support and supports new chipsets too ... What's the point in doing the same in 2 drivers ? what's the point of having two open drivers for the same cards ?

I mean shouldn't the X guys on both sides agree to work together and don't do "double work" ?

[Melcar]

I always thought that both drivers would specialize on different chips, and not overlap as they are doing right now. I was expecting radeon to take care of r400 and lower type hardware, and radeonhd r500 and above. Now with radeon starting to support even the newest cards, I don't see the need for 2 driver sets. The whole AtomBIOS thing seemed like the only real difference (and a rather "philosophical" one at that) between the two, and now with that difference gone, I see even less of a reason for having seperate sets, for basically the same hardware. I guess future performance differences (like 3D) that may pop up could justify one over the other.

[bridgman]

Actually both drivers use the same 3d code so that isn't likely to be a difference either

Seriously, this will take time while all the philosophical differences are worked out. Everyone has to feel comfortable working in the same code base and confident the code base will deliver what they need from it.

One of the differences betwee the open source world and regular commercial development is that where there are strongly held differences you often get a code fork rather than everyone stopping work or one person making an arbitrary decision -- it's not the fastest way to a solution but it's not necessarily all that bad either.

[some-guy]

This should have been obvious ... Use AtomBIOS first to get 2D support quickly and work on the useful part (3D), then go back to do cleaner 2D later on.

Wait. If that's how it's going to be, why is radeonhd moving to atombios, they can implement the better version, while radeon implements the quicker and easier version.

Then radeonhd can get the 3D code ported, and the focus could be switched to radeonhd and gallium, no more duplicated effort

[bridgman]

The problem with having two different drivers is that you have to do all the acceleration work in the atombios-based driver because you CAN'T SEE THE SCREEN on the other driver 'cause the modesetting code isn't there yet

Nobody is particularly fond of the idea of doing all the development work in one driver then porting it across to the other driver... over and over again.

[some-guy]

The problem with having two different drivers is that you have to do all the acceleration work in the atombios-based driver because you CAN'T SEE THE SCREEN on the other driver 'cause the modesetting code isn't there yet

Nobody is particularly fond of the idea of doing all the development work in one driver then porting it across to the other driver... over and over again.

I see the point, thanks for clearing that up

[izual]

they will begin focusing on open-source 3D support for the Radeon HD 4800 series

Maybe it's some sort of paranoia, but this sounds like "let's skip the R6xx family".

But it's just paranoia right?
It would be stupid.

[rbmorse]

It only matters if you own an R6XX product.

(I do).

[bridgman]

No plans to skip the 6xx family. I have one in my home PC, there's no damn way we're skipping it

The issue is that we have sample code for 7xx that actually works, while we're still having problems with the 6xx sample code (it seems to have been broken on 6xx in the process of making it work on 7xx). Starting with code that works (even if it's in the wrong environment and has to be totally rewritten for X/DRI) is "highly attractive".

6xx and 7xx are pretty close from a driver POV, so rather than getting things working on 6xx this week and same thing on 7xx next week we might go the other way. On the other hand, now that we have sample code working on 7xx we may suddenly figure out why it doesn't work on 6xx.

Either way, we plan to do 6xx and 7xx in parallel; trying to design code that will work on both.

[c0un7d0wn]

So kernel modesetting will also use atombios, right?