ATI R200 Documentation Coming Too

[NeoBrain]

I know you guys are interested in pulling in new developers. Wouldn't the best way to do so be to release all docs for all graphics chips you've ever made? Let new developers start from the beginning?

Don't wanna kill your dream, but I think there are more important docs to release apart from the ones of 10 year old graphics chips.

Anyways, it's still nice to see AMD/ATI keep its word and releases all docs the open source community needs (or even doesn't really need )

[SunTzuTech]

Phoronix: ATI R200 Documentation Coming Too

In the Phoronix Forums following Friday's release of the (NDA-free) ATI R300 3D register information, AMD's John Bridgman has confirmed that he is looking to release documentation going back to the ATI Radeon 8500 era graphics processors. Years ago ATI had released this R200 documentation to the open-source driver developers at the time, but it was encumbered by legal restrictions. John doesn't believe these R200 documents will be of any use to the xf86-video-ati developers for improving the Radeon 8500 to 9250 open-source support, but that it will help assist new open-source developers in beginning to understand graphics programming...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NjM5NA

I have a laptop with an IGP340M, and still use it
pretty heavily. If you can get them to release the
programming specs on the mobile R200 chipsets, that
would be a big help, as I'm still seeing one
particuarly nasty bug in Solaris X86/Xorg where
the Xserver goes infinite when I start Gnome. CDE
still works fine.

[mattst88]

Obviously the R600/R700 push is number one priority currently, but where do we stand on the release of R200 and Rage 128 docs?

[TechMage89]

Aren't the Rage 128 docs already out there?

Also, I believe most of the information in the docs has already been put to use in the drivers, so I'm not sure how much it would help for these models.

[bridgman]

I don't think the docs we have would help either of the drivers; the only benefit I see from them is as an introduction for new driver developers... assuming they can *find* an R2xx these days

I believe there may be some features in the chip which aren't fully supported in the drivers but they aren't in those documents either. Given the ongoing pain with AGP there's an argument for writing a similar "so you wanna be a driver developer, huh ?" guide for a more recent chip instead, maybe a 5xx-family PCIE part. I always felt the docco would be more useful if it referenced actual sections in the open source driver rather than just saying "do this".

[bugmenot]

Apropos: I installed Debian Etch on a 600 mhz laptop yesterday, which has an ati chip inside. Some kind of rage foo... and I wasn't able to get 3d (I think because I could not get any DRI, according to the log). I red I had to compile the mach64 DRI driver or something like that, but after 3 hours or so I gave up. I could not compile it , there were always errors.

I asked myself why this did not work out of the box, I mean this is really old. On [1] I read that mach64 isn't build by default, I wanted to ask if that is still the case. And if it is, if one could not change this.

Or *should* 3d work actually out-of-the-box? So is this a a bug in Debian?
I know you have really a lot to do to get R600/700 3d working (I have also a radeonhd 3200, so I really like your work!) but I also like to hear a statement if so old chips are still supported.
(If you want to see something else, just take a look at this. Should be easy compared to complicated chips like the current ones.)
Would be great, if *every* chip produced by ati could still be supported.

Thanks for your hard work and come good to the next year.


[1] http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/ATIM...wareChipset%29

[chithanh]

mach64 drm is not in the upstream kernel and not shipped by all distributions, because it used to be insecure. It has been made secure some time ago but the developers did not push it upstream. On Gentoo, you can install it with VIDEO_CARDS="mach64" in make.conf and emerge x11-drm, on other distributions you may have to download and compile it manually.

[bugmenot]

mach64 drm is not in the upstream kernel and not shipped by all distributions, because it used to be insecure. It has been made secure some time ago but the developers did not push it upstream.

Thanks for the answer.

If it is secure now, why can't a dev just push it so that in future distributions it works ootb?
And since this is an ati driver, an ati dev could do this, doesn't he? This would make me really happy! (Could a dev take a look at this, please?)


Just imagine every chip has open source 3d support ootb *dream*
Wouldn't this be great?

[User0x45]

the only benefit I see from them is as an introduction for new driver developers... assuming they can *find* an R2xx these days

Hi Bridgman, I am interested in helping debug the r2xx video adapter module I'm using in X.

I would love to read this r2xx doc to help me understand and describe more accurately what's going on with my machine.

What's the timeline for release?

[bridgman]

When we either find an editable copy (no luck yet) or have time to scan and OCR what we have back into something we can edit and release. Rough guess is a month before we have time to start work on it, maybe another month after that. Just guessing though... I was hoping an editable file would have turned up by now.

AFAIK everything covered by the document is already working in the R200 drivers, so there doesn't seem to be much to debug other than the usual AGP problems which we can't help with in our documents anyways -- most of the fixes really need to be in chipset drivers. Do you have an R200-based system that isn't working ?