ATI R600/R700 Gallium3D Winsys Published

When it comes to Gallium3D hardware drivers for ATI Radeon graphics cards, most of the work up to this point has been focused on the R300g driver that is for ATI's older graphics processors up through the R500 / Radeon X1000 series. The Gallium3D R300 DRI support is considered done as is most of the driver. The ATI Gallium3D driver though isn't ready for prime-time usage quite yet, but should undergo more broad testing shortly along with the state trackers. The Gallium3D support for newer ATI/AMD graphics processors (particularly the R600/700 series, R800/Evergreen support has not been started) still is very premature and it will be a while before this driver stack is stable. The good news though is that it's progressing and the R600/700 winsys for Gallium3D has emerged.

Jerome Glisse, a long-time open-source ATI driver developer who now works for Red Hat, has shared that he's finished up cleaning the initial R600/700 winsys API for which the R600/700 Gallium3D driver will be based. Once it is all cleaned up and ready, it will be hooked up into the Gallium3D pipe driver for the ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series hardware. In the context of Gallium3D, the winsys binds the state tracker and pipe driver together with the underlying software stack on the operating system.

In his blog post where Jerome goes over this R600/700 winsys, he shares this is a radically new design and employs an entirely different approach for this driver that should allow for a variety of new, interesting features. Jerome will be talking more about these capabilities at X@FOSDEM 2010 next month in Brussels, which we will be covering.

Jerome has published his winsys code to this Git repository. For anyone running R600/700 hardware with kernel mode-setting, you can run Jerome's standalone demo without an X Server to see a gray and blue rendering.