AMD Catalyst 9.8 Delivers New Kernel Support

It's taken quite a while, but AMD has finally delivered support for the Linux 2.6.29 kernel within their Catalyst driver. The Linux 2.6.29 kernel was released in March, but it has taken until today for AMD to release any support for this kernel. However, at the same time, they have also released support for the Linux 2.6.30 kernel, which arrived back in June. The Linux 2.6.31 kernel will now soon be released, but with Catalyst 9.8 there is no such support. There will, however, have to be support for this kernel by Catalyst 9.10 for inclusion with the next Ubuntu release.

Beyond the new kernel support, there is a fix for water rendering in the Unigine Tropics benchmark (available through the Phoronix Test Suite), fixes for the Ogre engine, ACPI-based display switching on laptops with RandR 1.2 enabled, support for several new OpenGL extensions, and various other fixes. Needless to say, still missing from Catalyst 9.8 is XvBA support that is accompanied by any documentation or media player patches.

The official release notes are not yet available, but should be out soon. AMD's Catalyst 9.8 driver for Linux can be downloaded from their driver area.