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AMD Releases Radeon HD 6000 Series Open-Source Support

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  • #31
    Originally posted by smitty3268 View Post
    Will the Cayman support be added to r600g, or will it require a new driver? rCaymang? Doesn't have quite the same ring to it...
    It will be added to r600g.

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    • #32
      If hardware vendors won't start some serious support of their products on Linux, less and less Linux users will want to buy and use them; also, lack of hardware support is one of the major causes of people sticking with Windows rather than anything else. This obviously leads software developers to ignore Linux itself as an appetible target for their projects, since the userbase is neglectible. And that last thing leads hardware vendors to ignore Linux, and so on and so forth. This is a vicious circle that has to be broken somewhere, and day-1 hardware support is one of the best ways to do that. And if it's open-source, it's a whole lot better.

      I was waiting for this news since I bought my Radeon HD 6870 last November, and now I can finally install Linux on my desktop box without the hassle of hacking with the Catalyst suite; for this, I want to thank John Bridgman and everyone else working on the open-source radeon drivers.

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      • #33
        Good job for all those involved.

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        • #34
          Originally posted by agd5f View Post
          The advantage of tracking and working the upstream projects (kernel, mesa, X) is that your code will always work with the latest releases. The disadvantage is that it will need some work and there will be some lag to port to older releases. If you track older releases, there will be work and lag required to support newer ones.

          The open drivers track the latest releases. They catch a lot of grief for not supporting older releases immediately, although most distros do a good job of backporting the necessary changes.

          The closed drivers target current releases, but that means there is usually a lag catching up the support for the latest kernel/X releases. They catch grief for not supporting the latest kernel/X releases immediately.

          Neither option is perfect.
          Ah thankyou. You read between the lines at what I was getting at I suspected this might be what was going on with the OSS driver.

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          • #35
            Originally posted by FunkyRider View Post
            The whole linux graphics driver stack is flawed.

            We don't need to wait for some years for a new version of Windows to run a new graphics card, instead we install the vendor provided driver.

            Without the ability to dynamically expand drivers, Xorg will forever be the second class citizen in graphics world.
            Forgive my ignorance, isn't xorg semi-modular? Can't xf86-video-ati be upgraded independently? So isn't this not so much an xorg problem as much as a traditional linux distribution upgrade path problem?

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            • #36
              xf86-video-ati doesn't do much. Only 2d acceleration and Xvideo, basically.

              For 3d acceleration (or any acceleration), you need to upgrade the kernel, libdrm (the two must be in sync!) and mesa.

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              • #37
                Originally posted by pingufunkybeat View Post
                libdrm (the two must be in sync!)
                As long as you are using a libdrm_radeon from the last year or so (once radeon came out of staging in the kernel), you should be fine.

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                • #38
                  Originally posted by Tudhalyas View Post
                  ..This obviously leads software developers to ignore Linux itself as an appetible target for their projects, since the userbase is neglectible...
                  True men only use vi...

                  3D Graphics be gone! :P

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                  • #39
                    Originally posted by Mazur View Post
                    Woah AMD, now I am seriously thinking about coming back to my old HD 5670 (or 5650, I can't remember) from NVIDIA 8600 GT but seriously how is support for Evergreen now comparing to this HD 6000?
                    I don't own an Evergreen card, but from what I've been reading the open source support is now quite good. 3D support was added in September 2010 and the latest thing to be added in the just-released 2.6.37 Linux kernel is hardware blit support - see http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item&px=ODU4Mw

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