ATI R200 Documentation Coming Too

[bridgman]

I don't think the docs we have would help either of the drivers; the only benefit I see from them is as an introduction for new driver developers... assuming they can *find* an R2xx these days

I believe there may be some features in the chip which aren't fully supported in the drivers but they aren't in those documents either. Given the ongoing pain with AGP there's an argument for writing a similar "so you wanna be a driver developer, huh ?" guide for a more recent chip instead, maybe a 5xx-family PCIE part. I always felt the docco would be more useful if it referenced actual sections in the open source driver rather than just saying "do this".

[TechMage89]

Aren't the Rage 128 docs already out there?

Also, I believe most of the information in the docs has already been put to use in the drivers, so I'm not sure how much it would help for these models.

[mattst88]

Obviously the R600/R700 push is number one priority currently, but where do we stand on the release of R200 and Rage 128 docs?

[SunTzuTech]

Phoronix: ATI R200 Documentation Coming Too

In the Phoronix Forums following Friday's release of the (NDA-free) ATI R300 3D register information, AMD's John Bridgman has confirmed that he is looking to release documentation going back to the ATI Radeon 8500 era graphics processors. Years ago ATI had released this R200 documentation to the open-source driver developers at the time, but it was encumbered by legal restrictions. John doesn't believe these R200 documents will be of any use to the xf86-video-ati developers for improving the Radeon 8500 to 9250 open-source support, but that it will help assist new open-source developers in beginning to understand graphics programming...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NjM5NA

I have a laptop with an IGP340M, and still use it
pretty heavily. If you can get them to release the
programming specs on the mobile R200 chipsets, that
would be a big help, as I'm still seeing one
particuarly nasty bug in Solaris X86/Xorg where
the Xserver goes infinite when I start Gnome. CDE
still works fine.

[NeoBrain]

I know you guys are interested in pulling in new developers. Wouldn't the best way to do so be to release all docs for all graphics chips you've ever made? Let new developers start from the beginning?

Don't wanna kill your dream, but I think there are more important docs to release apart from the ones of 10 year old graphics chips.

Anyways, it's still nice to see AMD/ATI keep its word and releases all docs the open source community needs (or even doesn't really need )

[jnolck]

r128

Me three. I might be wrong, but i remember there was 2d docs for the r128 without NDA's.

I know you guys are interested in pulling in new developers. Wouldn't the best way to do so be to release all docs for all graphics chips you've ever made? Let new developers start from the beginning?

This is not a request, it's just my dream come true. Docs from the mach32 all the way to r600 and beyond. Mach32 being important because programming it was talked about in Richard F Ferraro's book.

[domi]

It's not the content, but the confidential notices that are written all over the documents. Unfortunately, we can't release the documents with that language all over them.

It may be possible to directly manipulate the content of the PDF. See CAM::PDF perl module for instance http://search.cpan.org/~cdolan/CAM-PDF-1.12/

HTH

[agd5f]

Heh...which is why I haven't breached my agreement with ATI over those files...

In all honesty, I don't think there's anything TOO problematic at this point in time in those files- but if you can't find the editables, you might want to see if legal will sign off on what was sanitized to the point of the original NDA'd FOSS releases to the Utah-GLX team.

It's not the content, but the confidential notices that are written all over the documents. Unfortunately, we can't release the documents with that language all over them.

[Svartalf]

We have the PDFs, it's a matter of whether or not we can find the original *editable* versions so we can remove all the confidential language

Heh...which is why I haven't breached my agreement with ATI over those files...

In all honesty, I don't think there's anything TOO problematic at this point in time in those files- but if you can't find the editables, you might want to see if legal will sign off on what was sanitized to the point of the original NDA'd FOSS releases to the Utah-GLX team.

[agd5f]

I too would like to see the r128 docs released. I found copies of NDA'd version a long time ago. If I can find them, I would have to imagine that ATI could find them in their archives.

bridgman, if it helps locate the documents in ATI's archives, their filenames are:

R128REGRE.pdf - Rage 128 Register Reference Guide
RR45101C.pdf - Rage 128 Pro Register Reference Guide
rr47003oemp.pdf - Rage Mobility M3 Register Reference Guide (OEM)

We have the PDFs, it's a matter of whether or not we can find the original *editable* versions so we can remove all the confidential language