2013: A Good Year For Open-Source AMD?

[Hamish Wilson]

Just to add some common decency and politeness to this thread: I wish to offer my thanks to bridgman, agd5f, airlie, and everyone else who is working on improving these drivers. If it was not for your hard work we would not have anything to talk about here at all, and everyone should be grateful. I at least appreciate your efforts.

Now, was that so hard everyone?

[smitty3268]

Can you share with us _why_ this turns out to be problematic?
I think it's obvious for the UVD blocks - but for the PM bits?

Nope. Same goes for all of the programming info...

[smitty3268]

@bridgman
is there still work being done for the UVD ???

Yes, although we're not at the point where I can say anything more encouraging than before about chances of exposing the HW.

What about the video encoder that the new chips have?

I'm not particularly in a hurry to get support for it, I'm just wondering if it's a minefield of patents/lawyers as well, or if you think that would be easier than decoding through UVD.

[airlied]

If reverse engineering the FGLRX is more useful than using specs from AMD then the hole support from AMD is a lie?

or maybe i didn't understand you here.

yeah you didn't understand because I never said it in a general way. We just know in some cases that fglrx uses the hw in ways that the docs don't/won't cover, e.g. UVD. In most cases this isn't true, and its fine to never RE fglrx, because the docs are fine.

So really in most cases I wouldn't dream of RE'ing fglrx since we have good enough docs/access to engineers.

[curaga]

Don't think we were talking about turning UVD off -- I was talking about decoding video with it.

Of course I meant "UVD and other unused blocks on the card", but didn't quite phrase that right.

[ChrisXY]

ok then in "video playback" and "power-management" the spec and AMD support is a lie...

There's still a little difference in "good enaugh so it works, but not as good as it possibly could" and "a lie".

[airlied]

ok then in "video playback" and "power-management" the spec and AMD support is a lie... and the other stuff from AMD is fine.

i really don't understand AMD here.

is that like the cake is a lie?

not sure who you think AMD lied to, they never said they'd provide open support for anything until they cleared it.

Dave.

[amphigory]

is that like the cake is a lie?

not sure who you think AMD lied to, they never said they'd provide open support for anything until they cleared it.

Dave.

The cake is a lie!!!
The cake is a lie!!!
The cake is a lie!!!
The cake is a lie!!!
The cake is a lie!!!

OK. Never mind... On a serious note, I have not seen any commits lately for VDPAU State Tracker. Does anyone know if H.264 support is in the works yet? I had to move to NVIDIA card for my HTPC about six months ago and was not particularly happy about it.

Or do I get sent back to the "Aperture Science Enrichment Center" for asking this question?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RthZgszykLs

[smitty3268]

The cake is a lie!!!
The cake is a lie!!!
The cake is a lie!!!
The cake is a lie!!!
The cake is a lie!!!

OK. Never mind... On a serious note, I have not seen any commits lately for VDPAU State Tracker. Does anyone know if H.264 support is in the works yet? I had to move to NVIDIA card for my HTPC about six months ago and was not particularly happy about it.

Or do I get sent back to the "Aperture Science Enrichment Center" for asking this question?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RthZgszykLs

Will AMD even touch h.264 support, or will the community have to do that because of patent issues?

[amphigory]

Will AMD even touch h.264 support, or will the community have to do that because of patent issues?

Christian K?nig started H.264 work back in January I believe. It should be safe as long as it is left as a build option (akin to '--enable-texture-float' switch).