The ATI Evergreen DRM Now Has Blit Support

While just earlier today we reported that the ATI Evergreen open-source 3D code may soon move into a Gallium3D driver while for now it's rather stagnate within the classic Mesa R600 driver, there is good news today to report from the Evergreen DRM/kernel side too. AMD's Alex Deucher has just released a patch to the Radeon DRM to enable blit support using the 3D engine for ATI Radeon HD 5000 series hardware.

This ~1,200 line patch enables blit support for buffer object moves using the Evergreen 3D engine and allows for full use of the video RAM beyond the PCI aperture size, which is also good news for the Radeon HD 5000 series hardware with large amounts of video memory or even the Evergreen workstation variants like the FirePro V9800 that launched today with 4GB of memory. The hardware blit support is implemented in the same way as it was done for the R600/R700 GPUs.

This patch, which for now can be found on the dri-devel mailing list, should be queued up for the Linux 2.6.37 kernel.