Radeon Driver To Support ATI R500/600

While all of the open-source rage for the ATI R500 and R600 series has been about the official RadeonHD driver, it seems that the Radeon (as in xf86-video-ati) driver will support these new ATI GPU families as well. David Airlie has established an atombios-support branch in xf86-video-ati and a r500-support branch in DRM. David Airlie and Alex Deucher have been working on introducing AtomBIOS support to the Radeon driver for the R400/500/600 series and Radeon acceleration support for the R500 (Radeon X1000) family. The Radeon driver now supports XAA and EXA with the R500 graphics cards. 3D is not supported, however, it is being worked on. This AtomBIOS branch does support RandR 1.2 as well as dual-link TMDS outputs, and external TMDS chips on the R400 GPUs. David had mentioned that open-source 3D support on the R500 series through the Radeon driver should be possible in the near future and that Compiz support should come sooner rather than later. Read more on David Airlie's blog.