Mesa 21.3.3 Released With Fixes For Old ATI R300~R500 GPUs, RADV Fixes Too

[ubuntulove74]

It was early R600 family - R600 was first, then RV610/630/670 (aka Shaka, Laka and Boom).

I'm pretty sure the 2600 Pro was an RV630.

thanks for your attention
One question: Are these older AMD series, especially the ATI 2600 Pro, suitable for developing drivers outside of the Intel and AMD ecosystem, for example RISC-V?
I want to read their document for development.

[bridgman]

One question: Are these older AMD series, especially the ATI 2600 Pro, suitable for developing drivers outside of the Intel and AMD ecosystem, for example RISC-V? I want to read their document for development.

The RV630 would probably be a pretty good candidate, since it has quite a bit of documentation. The main downside I can think of is that the cards are probably relatively scarce right now so if the card you had died you might have a problem.

https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/#documentation

That said, the existing drivers already work on a fairly wide variety of CPUs so it would probably be a few orders of magnitude less work to just compile the current drivers on your target platform and work through any issues.

[smitty3268]

thanks for your attention
One question: Are these older AMD series, especially the ATI 2600 Pro, suitable for developing drivers outside of the Intel and AMD ecosystem, for example RISC-V?
I want to read their document for development.

I wouldn't recommend it.

The R600 series has pretty buggy driver support in Mesa, because that was when AMD was first trying to bring up their open source stack. I think there are lots of little issues that never really got fixed before AMD moved their attention on to the R700 series (which itself had a lot of driver issues on the various RV series cards). It was really Evergreen when the drivers finally caught up with the hardware, so that'd probably be your best bet.

And the Mesa drivers are going to be by far the best documentation you're going to get on the hardware.

[microcode]

At home, I've switched to exclusively Noctua fans and Seasonic PSUs. Never had any issues with those, in the 10 years or so since I first started to switched over.

I definitely go Noctua and Seasonic when I build anything; they have real reputations built on consistent delivery.

[ubuntulove74]

I wouldn't recommend it.

The R600 series has pretty buggy driver support in Mesa, because that was when AMD was first trying to bring up their open source stack. I think there are lots of little issues that never really got fixed before AMD moved their attention on to the R700 series (which itself had a lot of driver issues on the various RV series cards). It was really Evergreen when the drivers finally caught up with the hardware, so that'd probably be your best bet.

And the Mesa drivers are going to be by far the best documentation you're going to get on the hardware.

What about the 7350 (7000) ?
Newer than 2600 Pro and with TDP less than 2600 Pro .
But unfortunately I can't find the 7000 series documents in x.org.

[smitty3268]

What about the 7350 (7000) ?
Newer than 2600 Pro and with TDP less than 2600 Pro .
But unfortunately I can't find the 7000 series documents in x.org.

I believe that's an Evergreen card, so probably in better shape.

[ubuntulove74]

I wouldn't recommend it.

The R600 series has pretty buggy driver support in Mesa, because that was when AMD was first trying to bring up their open source stack. I think there are lots of little issues that never really got fixed before AMD moved their attention on to the R700 series (which itself had a lot of driver issues on the various RV series cards). It was really Evergreen when the drivers finally caught up with the hardware, so that'd probably be your best bet.

And the Mesa drivers are going to be by far the best documentation you're going to get on the hardware.

What about the R700 series? What are the status of Mesa bugs?

[smitty3268]

What about the R700 series? What are the status of Mesa bugs?

My recollection at the time was the main flagship cards were reasonably solid, but some of the less powerful variants were a bit buggy. But definitely a lot better than r600. And that may have been mostly fixed at some point, I'm not sure.