AMD: Accelerating Open-Source Drivers?

So far today at Phoronix we've published the AMD 8.41 Display Driver Preview, ATI R300/400 Linux Performance, ATI R500 Linux Performance, and ATI Radeon HD 2900XT Linux Performance -- yet, it's only ten minutes past midnight! However, looking at AMD's official statement on the Linux driver, there is a rather interesting sentence about good things to come...

The official AMD press release states: "In the coming months AMD also plans to accelerate efforts to address the needs of the open source community as well." But what does this mean? Are they opening up the fglrx driver? Are they providing specifications? Are they just making a better binary blob so the open-source community will just want reverse engineer it more?

Remember, it was also earlier this year where AMD's (now defunct) Henri Richard at the Red Hat Summit announced a new Linux commitment. Dell and Google have also announced they want better Linux drivers from ATI. It also isn't hard to find users wanting graphics drivers to be opened up. Is this upcoming announcement the reason why the 8.41 Linux driver isn't available for download today?

We know what AMD is doing and in the near future Phoronix will be sharing with you what they will be doing to accelerate their open-source efforts, but feel free to share your thoughts and hopes about this move in the Phoronix Forums. As glorious as these new performance numbers are for the R300/400, R500, and R600, what AMD will be sharing in the near future with this announcement is equally exciting.

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