Tiling Is Being Worked On For The Open Evergreen Driver

While the Radeon HD 6000 series is AMD's latest generation of graphics processor, and has initial open-source support available as of earlier this month, the open-source Linux GPU driver support isn't yet complete for the older Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" series and generations even older than that. One of the features that has been lacking for Evergreen is tiling support within the ATI Gallium3D "R600g" driver for the HD 5000 series while it is available for the R600 ASICs and earlier. Evergreen tiling support though is now being worked on, which should deliver a performance boost once fully implemented for this hardware.

David Airlie pushed out a commit this evening to the mainline Mesa tree (via CGit) that starts "looking" at Evergreen tiling. It adds in the need ioctl interface and some other early work basically bringing it to the R600 position at this point. 2D tiling has yet to be addressed.

Hopefully by the time Mesa 7.11 rolls around in a couple of months he support will be ready.