Hard-Coded ATI RV770 Support Arrives

Earlier this week we reported on RadeonHD driver support for the RV770 with the Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870 graphics cards. This support arrived within the RadeonHD driver's new AtomBIOS branch that relies upon ATI's video BIOS abstraction layer as opposed to "banging the registers" and interfacing with the hardware directly. However, the lead developer of the xf86-video-radeonhd driver has back-ported the RV770 support using these hard-coded paths.

Novell's Egbert Eich has announced on the RadeonHD mailing list this morning that the RV770 support can now be found in the driver's main development branch. This hard-coded support was achieved by just bringing forward the changes in the AtomBIOS branch with the memory controller, i2C, and then of course the PCI IDs. As the display blocks didn't change between the RV620/635 (the Radeon HD 3400/3600 series) and the RV770 (Radeon HD 4800 series), the mode-setting had "just worked" with these minimal changes.

While this had worked out in favor for the Novell developers that have long-preferred their hard-coded approach (for more information see Radeon vs. RadeonHD), the AtomBIOS support branch will likely be merged to their mainline driver in the very near future.