AMD Publishes Evergreen Shader Documents

[bridgman]

When we released the first set of specs back in 2007 everyone was sitting around Matthew Garrett's living room watching who was downloading the docs.

Most of the sites were predictable but some (at least one prison, for example) were a surprise.

[Louise]

I guess Intel and nVidia were the first to download

They are probably the biggest supports for the open sourcing

[linuxjacques]

Thank you ATI / AMD.

Keep up the good work!

[droidhacker]

...at least one prison.

Hans Reiser?

[chaos386]

As a 5850 owner, this is great news! On a side note, is it clear yet if the drivers will require 2.6.33+ kernels? KMS will, obviously, but what about 2D acceleration and xv?

The upcoming Atom N450 "Pine Trail" also comes with a GMA500 derivate,

GMA 3150 is based on GMA 3100.

[Adarion]

...prison... Hans Reiser?

LOL! I resisted to ask that question.

But is there any other interesting outcome of the who downloaded it? Were there really nv and intel interested (probably yes)? How did you monitor? Just by IP address?

[bridgman]

You should assume the code will go into the 2.6.33 (hopefully) or higher kernel trees. It's often possible to patch the drm code onto a slighly older kernel, so far I think 2.6.33-on-2.6.32 is working ok (although no guarantees from the devs). It should be possible to backport the code into older kernels on a distro-by-distro basis since the addition of new HW support usually has a very low risk of breaking existing support.

The docco download information came off the server logs; I figured it was IP address plus a reverse lookup but didn't ask.

Apparently there were ~72,000 doc downloads in the first five hours... maybe 10-20 people used the documentation to work on the driver but I'm not sure what all the rest of the downloads were used for

[Nille]

I guess Intel and nVidia were the first to download

I think they both know how the ATI cards work

[deanjo]

Apparently there were ~72,000 doc downloads in the first five hours... maybe 10-20 people used the documentation to work on the driver but I'm not sure what all the rest of the downloads were used for

lol, never underestimate the data packrat mentality, you think 2 TB hard drives that are bought are actually used to store stuff that people will use on a regular basis?

There was a article recently that showed the amount of times people accessed their saved data. IIRC it wound up being that less then 1% of all data on the harddrive was accessed more then once. If I can find the article again I'll post the link.

[RobbieAB]

Now, why do I download the specs everytime AMD releases something? I know I don't understand any of it

Because you can? Oh the joy's of open documentation...