RadeonSI Gallium3D Gets New State Handling

AMD pushed a load of commits this morning into the mainline Mesa Git repository that provide a new state handling implementation for the Radeon HD 7000 series "RadeonSI" Gallium3D driver.

The commits by AMD's Christian König began this morning with radeonsi: rework state handling v2 and continued with many more patches touching hundreds of lines of code as the state handling was reworked.

These are the first RadeonSI Gallium3D driver commits in mainline Mesa in one week. RadeonSI Gallium3D driver commits can be found via a CGit grep.

Unfortunately the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver isn't yet in a ready state for end-users, even though Radeon HD 7000 series hardware has been shipping for more than six months. Yes, the Radeon HD 7000 "Southern Islands" / GCN architecture has big differences compared to previous generations of Radeon graphics processors, but still isn't an excuse for taking so long on the open-source Linux driver support.

The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver won't be up to par with the "R600g" driver for next month's Mesa 8.1 release so it won't be until 2013 (with Mesa 8.2+) -- more than one year after the first AMD HD 7000 series graphics cards first shipped -- that the open-source support will be in a good state and found in Ubuntu (13.04) and elsewhere.