XDC 2008: Radeon, RandR 1.3, & More

The second day of XDC 2008 was filled with quite a bit of technical information (as you can see from the Wiki notes page) ranging from the DRI2 infrastructure and talking about its event ring buffer and simpler DDX driver requirements to discussing video playback APIs. However, there are a few bits of information that are relevant to the community at large.

- Radeon kernel mode-setting is in progress. The new Radeon driver that does kernel mode-setting will be using the AtomBIOS. Jerome Glisse realizes now though that rewriting the driver was probably a mistake and should have started out with the existing DDX (xf86-video-ati) driver code. AtomBIOS is being used for leveraging the engineering work of AMD, mode-setting is "uninteresting", and reducing the time to support the new hardware so that these developers can focus a majority of their time on "fun" features. Right now there is an ongoing debate of AtomBIOS usage versus communicating directly with the hardware registers, which is the large difference in the Radeon and RadeonHD drivers. Future work includes moving to DRI2 and writing a Gallium3D driver.

- David Schleef had talked about video playback on X and his work on Dirac, which is a codec designed to be competitive with MPEG-4. He had went over the pros and cons of X-Video and OpenGL playback and says the future as having a pluggable pipeline, extending X-Video, and offering GPGPU (General-Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units) codecs.

- Alex Deucher had talked extensively about the R600 GPU architecture, but he had also commented that the TCORE programming SDK will be out soon as well as another programming guide. This TCORE code should be out very soon -- there was a 50%+ probability that it would have been released yesterday. We have talked about what TCORE means in an earlier article.

- Last but not least, Keith Packard had talked about RandR 1.3. The proposed features for this update to RandR 1.2 includes DPMS events, per-output DPMS, panning rectangle, projective transforms, GPU objects, CRTC properties, and standard output properties.

More details can be read on the XDC Wiki.