No, AMD Will Not Be Opening Up Its Firmware/Microcode

[karolherbst]

does anybody happen to know how "low-level" that stuff is?

[libv]

Brent: the original specification of AtomBIOS was that the function tables would only hold ASIC specific things, and not board specific information. Board specific information was to be provided in data tables. This was gradually and increasingly broken in r6xx.

If we had been able to continue this project like that, there would have been a high probability that we ended up in a situation where we would also be able to open source the firmware of the 3d engine/CP. But that of course did not happen.

[libv]

My synapses tell me that that account manager was called "Ted Donnely", and the moved-aside account manager was a John ... Argh... John Hooten was the project manager from AMD side, but the guy one layer above was also a John.

[bridgman]

My synapses tell me that that account manager was called "Ted Donnely", and the moved-aside account manager was a John ... Argh... John Hooten was the project manager from AMD side, but the guy one layer above was also a John.

John Fritz maybe ? If it makes you feel any better, I found the changing account manager situation just as confusing as you did.

BTW if you bring AtomBIOS discussions (VBIOS code running on CPU via an open source interpreter) into HW microcode (running on logic within GPU HW blocks) there is a good chance of hopelessly confusing the discussion.

Given that the Radeon firmware is getting ever more complex and controlling more things, that is quite unfortunate.
As I understand it, the firmware controls the various command processors in the GPU, and with the new Radeon Pro SSG also manages storage. So it is turning into a fully-fledged operating system.

Huh ? There are no plans to have GPU microcode manage storage... that's driver work only. Maybe you are talking about the firmware that comes on SSD drives from the drive vendor ?

[duby229]

Duby, we were doing it with RadeonHD, and at very effective speed as well. We were mostly blocked by things which ATI was unable or unwilling to tell us, things which the fork (mostly) let us solve for them, and then quickly took over. Before the fork, there was a big user community as well which was very dilligent with reporting bugs (which is the first thing that vanishes when a fork happens) and with requesting support. Quite a few also added their own fixes, Christian Koenig being the best example.

You can see by the very existence of this thread that interest obviously must still exist for low level programming and on the other hand you can also tell obviously that there is resistance as well. Start a project and state a goal with it, and then start working towards it publicly. If there truly are people that agree with you, your efforts can bring them out.

[starshipeleven]

does anybody happen to know how "low-level" that stuff is?

you know what microcode means? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcode

[libv]

John Fritz maybe ? If it makes you feel any better, I found the changing account manager situation just as confusing as you did.

Yes! There was also John-Lowry Snow involved in the early days, to make the john confusion even more complete.

[starshipeleven]

You can see by the very existence of this thread that interest obviously must still exist for low level programming and on the other hand you can also tell obviously that there is resistance as well. Start a project and state a goal with it, and then start working towards it publicly. If there truly are people that agree with you, your efforts can bring them out.

Not gonna work, people isn't going to violate NDAs publicly just for lulz.

He cannot make such project unless AMD actually publishes stuff first.

[bridgman]

Yes! There was also John-Lowry Snow involved in the early days, to make the john confusion even more complete.

Oh geez, you're right.

[libv]

duby229: i have since done quite a few other things, big things.

Plus, Matthias Hopfs excellent atombios disassembler (much more useful than ATIs internal tools) is public, and all register docs published during RadeonHDs way-too-short and nastily aborted life, are still out there. RadeonHD code has not been erased from fd.o yet (that would be the cherry on the pie for quite a few xorg community members).

starshipeleven: all i have more than everyone else here is the 2 register level documents for late rv6xx or early r7xx. Mr Bridgman had verbally promised that he'd push that through so it could be released, but that never happened.