AMD R600 DRM Support Arrives, But No 3D

While AMD still has yet to release any R600 programming documentation or the source-code to their KGrids or TCore simulators (though the documentation may finally just be days away), Alex Deucher and David Airlie have been working on R600 DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) support. Today the first bits of this DRI component for the Radeon HD 2000/3000 series is now available. Within the Mesa/DRM git tree at FreeDesktop.org is a new r6xx-support branch. This R600 DRM uses the CP (Command Processor) for communication, but before checking out this branch, be forewarned that 3D acceleration isn't ready yet. While there is open-source R500 3D support and it's working quite well, Alex believes it will be at least another month or two until the Mesa and DDX code is in place for this R600 3D hardware acceleration.