The Progress Of The RadeonHD Driver

It's going on two weeks since the RadeonHD driver was made available, which is AMD's sanctioned open-source driver for the Radeon X1000 (R500) and Radeon HD 2000 (R600) series (as well as future generations of AMD GPUs). In this time, we have seen some great progress made with this open-source driver and have a few additional remarks to share about its status and the first bits of this driver's roadmap.

While AMD has yet to release anymore GPU documentation (aside from their initial 900 page dump), the RadeonHD driver development has been progressing nicely. Thanks to the new RadeonHD Conntest utility, support for many new R500 and R600 GPUs has been added over the past two weeks. When the Conntest utility was introduced into the RadeonHD driver it was briefly talked about, but it provides information about the connectors on the graphics card and now supports dumping the video BIOS. The Conntest README file explains the process needed in more detail and below is the sample output from a Mobility R500 graphics processor relating to its connectors.

Checking connectors on 0x7145, 0x17AA, 0x2006 (@01:00:00):
Load Detection: RHD_OUTPUT_NONE
HotPlug: RHD_HPD_NONE
DDC: RHD_DDC_2
LVDS Info:
18bits, dual link, LDI Panel found.
Power Timing: 0x465, 0x00F, 0x10, 0x64, 0x2A8
Macro: 0x0C720407, Clock Pattern: 0x0063

LVTMA TMDS has yet to be implemented but will hopefully be implemented soon. We have experienced success on a number of different R500 and R600 GPUs, but at the same time, we've experienced a number of failures and other issues too. Though one great thing to see is the Radeon HD 2900XT being powered by the RadeonHD driver.