R600/700 EXA X-Video Code Merged To Master

[bridgman]

The open source driver code is actually MIT/X11 licensed so using it in proprietary drivers is OK, but the fglrx driver architecture is sufficiently different that we probably wouldn't be able to re-use the code anyways.

[bugmenot]

Forgot that radeon has experimental tv-out support on r6xx, and also tear-free video playback on r5xx, which I think are not available on radeonhd.

AFAIK tear-free video playback is now also in radeonhd (git).

And *I* can't see any reason for using radeon. Radeonhd was the first and so the work on radeon to support the newest chips is duplicated effort. Also there are many places that are cleaned up in radeonhd, in radeon not.

Merging together does not really work and does not really make sense also. Those two driver are really pretty different. Let's see how the story continues with KMS....
The easiest thing would be that radeon simply stops supporting newer chips. Having two drivers is simply stupid and does not make sense at all. But we know that already and notice it every time again when a bug is only reported for the one driver and not for the other...

[bridgman]

Radeonhd was the first and so the work on radeon to support the newest chips is duplicated effort. Also there are many places that are cleaned up in radeonhd, in radeon not. Merging together does not really work and does not really make sense also. Those two driver are really pretty different. Let's see how the story continues with KMS.

It's not really that simple either, unfortunately. The radeonhd driver was actually the third, not the first -- we already had airlied's unreleased 5xx support in radeon and the avivo driver before starting work on radeonhd. We proposed replacing both of those drivers with a new driver built over the atombios routines, and the developers working on radeon and avivo felt that was a good plan.

So far so good; there would be a new driver based on atombios, supporting 5xx and up, and everyone would support it.

When radeonhd turned out to be mostly hard-coded there was a "WTF ??" moment in the rest of the dev community and things got complicated again. The devs who had agreed to support a new atombios-based driver rather than their existing hard-coded drivers said "screw this" and added atombios-based support to radeon. The rest, as they say, is history.

Over time (maybe a couple of years) I agree that KMS will solve the issue by eliminating the areas of code where the two drivers differ the most, but my current thinking is that both drivers will continue to exist until user modesetting goes away completely.

[susikala]

Forgot that radeon has experimental tv-out support on r6xx, and also tear-free video playback on r5xx, which I think are not available on radeonhd. But radeonhd has the hdmi audio support. Those three probably summarize the user visible differences?

Of course the modesetting code differences mean that different driver might have different outcome on various cards, but that's actually quite neat to find possible problem areas in both drivers.

Actually, radeon (git) has tear-free video playback on all chips. That is the main reason I use radeon and not radeonhd (although the patch may have been already ported to radeonhd or this was otherwise solved).

[izual]

ah, radeonhd merged to, very nice

[quintesse]

Actually, radeon (git) has tear-free video playback on all chips. That is the main reason I use radeon and not radeonhd (although the patch may have been already ported to radeonhd or this was otherwise solved).

When people say "radeon" do they refer to the "ati" driver or is there actually something called "radeon" that I don't know about?

[MostAwesomeDude]

When people say "radeon" do they refer to the "ati" driver or is there actually something called "radeon" that I don't know about?

The radeon driver is in the xf86-video-ati package for historical reasons. The ati driver is actually a wrapper that automatically selects mach64, rage128, or radeon depending on the chipset it detects.

[suokko]

One word: DynamicClocks +1 for radeon providing that for r500 cards

[PuckPoltergeist]

The radeon driver won't work here, not even without any acceleration. I only get a black screen with some artefacts the top border of the screen.

X.org log: http://www.stud.tu-ilmenau.de/~johi-...g.0.log.radeon

[agd5f]

The radeon driver won't work here, not even without any acceleration. I only get a black screen with some artefacts the top border of the screen.

X.org log: http://www.stud.tu-ilmenau.de/~johi-...g.0.log.radeon

Please file a bug (https://bugs.freedesktop.org) and attach your xorg log and config.