1) I hope that we see them actually GIVE us the 3D stuff. While I view the AMD Linux GPU team with nothing but the highest respect, they're very, very obviously waay understaffed and very obviously not going to get the new codebase drivers stable and backfill the missing functionalities in a reasonable amount of time at the rate they're able to work on things right at the moment. Especially with that release process they insist upon using over there at the former ATI division.
2) I think that this might be an okay place to be implementing the Gallium3D stuff, but it's not at all proven and not at all ensured that we won't come up with yet another driver interface other than it. (I do agree that the Mesa/DRI stuff's kind of dodgy; it was a major improvement over what was there with the Utah-GLX stuff (Which WAS a serious hack and a half- you wouldn't believe the awesome, but very, very squirrely things John Carmack did to get a configuration free RagePRO driver for it- and the others needed all kinds of jumping through flaming hoops to get there; we were just starting out on this thing at that point and we didn't have the experience that ATI or NVidia had at that point in time. DRI's another step in that same vein.) Something new is needed, but it's still not sure it's Gallium3D until they finish the first 1-2 cards' support within it.
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AMD Preparing For Another GPU Documentation Release
Phoronix: AMD Preparing For Another GPU Documentation Release
Back on September 6th of this year AMD shocked the open-source community by committing to the development of a new open-source display driver (this driver is now known as RadeonHD) and that they would be providing specifications to the development community. A week later, they set precedence by not only releasing the documentation to the developers but to the everyone! Their first batch of documentation covered the basics for the RV630 and M56 GPUs and was released freely to the public without any Non-Disclosure Agreement! However, they still have much more GPU documentation that has yet to be released. Some simply believe AMD is doing this as a publicity stunt, but today we have new details to share as they prepare for their next GPU documentation release.
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