The fglrx driver also contains code shared across multiple OSes, and all the OSes except Linux have strong DRM (Digital Rights Management, not Direct Rendering Manager) requirements. It's certainly possible to pick the driver apart and separate out the bits which can be safely exposed, but the result would look a lot more like ground beef than like a steak
Note that Intel doesn't release docs on all the hardware in their chips either. That is not meant as criticism; we are all dealing with the same constraints here. I didn't think IBM ever supported open source driver development for their graphics chips; Our FireGL guys might remember -- they used IBM GPUs before switching to ATI).
In all seriousness, I don't think documentation or sample code is a factor for power management or for higher levels of OpenGL support.
Power management is primarily waiting for things to settle down in the command submission portions of the driver stack so that power management code can dynamically adjust to drawing workload and display modes etc...
OpenGL 2.1 theoretically comes for free once Gallium3D drivers are running on 3xx-5xx. Gallium3D in turn is currently built over DRI2 and GEM/TTM, which are also in progress.
For anyone wondering why we expect the open source drivers to make you happy even if fglrx did not, the reason is simple. The open source drivers are aimed directly at the mix of functionality and performance that most of you are asking for and *only* contain code for that functionality. Fglrx is still aimed primarily at professional workstation users on a small set of enterprise Linux distibutions, and includes well over 10x as much hardware-specific code as the open source drivers.
You really need all that code to get every last bit of 3D performance out of the GPU, but a *much* smaller driver can provide all the functionality most of you expect along with perhaps 70% of the performance -- and can be tweaked to work well on a wide variety of distros and systems much more readily than our workstation driver.
Note that Intel doesn't release docs on all the hardware in their chips either. That is not meant as criticism; we are all dealing with the same constraints here. I didn't think IBM ever supported open source driver development for their graphics chips; Our FireGL guys might remember -- they used IBM GPUs before switching to ATI).
In all seriousness, I don't think documentation or sample code is a factor for power management or for higher levels of OpenGL support.
Power management is primarily waiting for things to settle down in the command submission portions of the driver stack so that power management code can dynamically adjust to drawing workload and display modes etc...
OpenGL 2.1 theoretically comes for free once Gallium3D drivers are running on 3xx-5xx. Gallium3D in turn is currently built over DRI2 and GEM/TTM, which are also in progress.
For anyone wondering why we expect the open source drivers to make you happy even if fglrx did not, the reason is simple. The open source drivers are aimed directly at the mix of functionality and performance that most of you are asking for and *only* contain code for that functionality. Fglrx is still aimed primarily at professional workstation users on a small set of enterprise Linux distibutions, and includes well over 10x as much hardware-specific code as the open source drivers.
You really need all that code to get every last bit of 3D performance out of the GPU, but a *much* smaller driver can provide all the functionality most of you expect along with perhaps 70% of the performance -- and can be tweaked to work well on a wide variety of distros and systems much more readily than our workstation driver.
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