State of R600/R700 Documentations ?

[Nille]

Exsist somewhere a Blog or something like that. To the the current progress ? Because about this Topic its a little bit silent

[krazy]

Just saw a bunch of commits related to R700 going into the radeonhd driver - so must be still chugging along okay!

[TechMage89]

2d/3d acceleration code is still being developed under NDA because AMD has had difficulty in sanitizing the documents for release. The only thing bridgman, the AMD rep here, will say about the release is "real soon now"

Modesetting should work for these cards already, I believe, although I thing some bugs are still being hunted down.

[rbmorse]

AMD announced today it is cutting about 500 employees. Anyone heard from Bridgeman, lately?

[bridgman]

I was off hunting for a few days, came down with really bad salmonella poisoning, and am now home in bed. Open source graphics is still alive.

The big delay with 6xx/7xx acceleration has not been "getting the documentation sanitized" it's been "figuring out how to make the new 3d engine work".

On previous GPU generations 2d and 3d used different hardware, and the 2d hardware was much simpler than the 3d hardware, so it was possible to get 2d acceleration out before 3d and show a constant stream of progress to users. On modern GPUs there is just the one big honkin' 3d engine, so that means 2d/video/3d all come out at the same time and it takes a lot longer to get the first accel support out.

Here's a quick recap :

1. We believe we have pretty much all of the functions we need for initial 2d, 3d and video acceleration running in house. As of last week the code was primarily in demo programs but we are starting to transfer that across to driver code now.

2. We have a basic shader assembler/compiler running which goes from arb_fragment_program and arb_vertex_program to shader code and state information which can be loaded into the GPU and used to draw on the screen.

3. As of last week most of the "wierdnesses" (eg demo program runs with one driver but not another, or runs on one distro but not another) have been figured out and fixed, so all the devs are now seeing pretty much the same behaviour (which makes progress a lot easier).

4. I still expect that our first release will be code rather than documentation, as a result of the massive amount of new info required for the new engine. The advantage of releasing code rather than docs for the first drop is that we only need to get "what's needed to make the driver work" inspected and cleared, while even the stingiest documentation needs to include a lot more technical info in order to let someone *write* a driver with the information.

5. We plan to release support for 6xx and 7xx simultaneously since the programming model for the two GPU generations is pretty similar (even though the underlying hardware is quite different).

[Nille]

THX

I thank everyone for give answers and bridgman I wish you well soon.

[rbmorse]

John, sorry to hear about the salmonella, it's a bitch.

Thank you for the progress report.

[Laughing1]

Get better soon bridgeman.