Radeon Driver Is Now KMS-Only, 7.0 Released

Alex Deucher announced the release of the xf86-video-ati 7.0.0 driver this morning, which is the first open-source ATI Linux graphics driver release that is strictly KMS-only.

Aside from being KMS-only, this DDX driver update now enables 2D tiling by default on R600+ ASICs, as was already extensively covered and benchmarked on Phoronix, which works best if using Mesa 9.0 or newer.

The xf86-video-ati 7.0.0 driver also presents X.Org Server 1.13 support, including for DRI2 PRIME support. Additionally, there's GLAMOR 2D acceleration support using the GLAMOR library for 2D over OpenGL. Last but not least, there's initial Radeon HD 7000 "Southern Islands" series support in this driver when using GLAMOR for 2D and the Radeon DRM driver on recent kernels where there is kernel mode-setting support. (Sadly though when it comes to proper OpenGL support on the HD 7000 series as it concerns end-users, it's still a wreck.)

The brief release announcement for xf86-video-ati 7.0.0 along with the source download link is available from the mailing list announcement.