Initial Open ATI Evergreen Support By FOSDEM?

In the comments area to the recent X.Org Talks For FOSDEM 2010 Still Missing posting, AMD's John Bridgman basically stated that there would be no talk on their open-source ATI driver progress as it's becoming predictable (and there's also a decreased travel budget), but his second comment was more interesting. "I'm kinda hoping we can have initial (display + shadowfb) Evergreen support out by FOSDEM. Fingers crossed."

The AMD Radeon HD 5000 series graphics cards (a.k.a. by the Evergreen family codename or R800) have been around for months now with graphics cards like the Radeon HD 5750 and Radeon HD 5770 along with other high-end and low-end graphics cards that have been introduced in more recent months. Earlier this month AMD even unveiled the first Mobility Radeon HD 5000 series GPUs. While there is support for these new ATI GPUs within the proprietary Catalyst driver, the open-source support has not been available.

AMD did publish some Evergreen shader documents just before Christmas, but they have not published any other documents or specs or any code for not even mode-setting. Internally they have been working on some code and do have analog outputs working with the Radeon HD 5000 graphics processors for at least one month while digital outputs were being a bit more troublesome. John Bridgman said back in December that the third week of January is when the first code may go public after clearing the IP/legal review process in a forum comment. The third week of January is now ending and there still is no sign of code, but Bridgman is thinking around the time of FOSDEM which would be the second week of February.

Hopefully the Evergreen support with mode-setting and ShadowFB support will be here by FOSDEM on the 6th of February, but it will still be longer before there is real 2D acceleration (EXA) or any 3D acceleration within the open-source stack.