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  • #21
    Originally posted by monraaf View Post
    I think it would be better if AMD just handed over the docs to Red Hat and payed them to develop the drivers. They have much more experience with open source.
    LMAO, you mean like what was done with RadeonHD?

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    • #22
      Originally posted by deanjo View Post
      LMAO, you mean like what was done with RadeonHD?
      Just to clarify that was Novell. Red Hat might or might not be better.

      On the other hand monraaf has a good point, Cooper and Richard barely commits anything. So what's up with them?

      I think Alex, Corbin, Dave, Jerome, Marek and Rafal* are _the_ developers with a few random commits from some other kind people. So it is 1 AMD, 2 RH and 2 freelancer. In my opinion this is not something AMD should be proud of.

      * The alphabetic order is intentional, they are all awesome. My apologies if I missed someone, only they came to my mind.
      Corbin seems recently to be a bit inactive, though.

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      • #23
        Originally posted by HokTar View Post
        On the other hand monraaf has a good point, Cooper and Richard barely commits anything. So what's up with them?
        Yeah I am wondering aswell.

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        • #24
          Originally posted by HokTar View Post
          On the other hand monraaf has a good point, Cooper and Richard barely commits anything. So what's up with them?
          Richard is mostly working on things where the IP has not yet been reviewed/released, so his work tends to come out in large and infrequent chunks. A lot of Alex's recent work has been in areas where the IP was released a year or more ago so code changes can come out "as they happen", ie more frequently.

          Cooper was pulled off onto a different project in late 2009; it was supposed to be temporary but seems to be more or less permanent. We may end up having to organize a replacement for him in the Shanghai open source team, not sure yet.
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          • #25
            Originally posted by bridgman View Post
            Richard is mostly working on things where the IP has not yet been reviewed/released, so his work tends to come out in large and infrequent chunks. A lot of Alex's recent work has been in areas where the IP was released a year or more ago so code changes can come out "as they happen", ie more frequently.

            Cooper was pulled off onto a different project in late 2009; it was supposed to be temporary but seems to be more or less permanent. We may end up having to organize a replacement for him in the Shanghai open source team, not sure yet.
            Thanks for that info. It'd be great to hear such stuff and some sort of progress reports more frequently (like every two weeks ?) - just to know what happens. I mean, it's a lot better to know if there are just difficulties or if somebody got pulled into another project than not knowing and waiting for the big patch that surely arrives - tomorrow.

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            • #26
              I don't think there's enough news to provide an update on anything like that frequency. I reported last fall that Cooper had been pulled off onto another project, and it's now looking pretty definite that he won't be coming back to open source graphics (so I reported that), but there wasn't really any news in between to report.
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              • #27
                Also, just to clarify, AMD never said we were writing the drivers ourselves. The plan has always to support the open source driver development process by providing documentation, code, and development advice. The more developers that get involved the better.

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                • #28
                  Originally posted by HokTar View Post
                  I think Alex, Corbin, Dave, Jerome, Marek and Rafal* are _the_ developers with a few random commits from some other kind people. So it is 1 AMD, 2 RH and 2 freelancer. In my opinion this is not something AMD should be proud of.
                  Apart from ignoring Richard and Cooper's work (little things like the 6xx/7xx 3D driver), why is this something we should not be proud of ? On the closed source side we write the drivers; on the open source side tha plan was always to work with and support the developer community, not to write and release the drivers ourselves.

                  EDIT - Alex beat me again ;(
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                  • #29
                    Originally posted by bridgman View Post
                    On the closed source side we write the drivers; on the open source side tha plan was always to work with and support the developer community, not to write and release the drivers ourselves.
                    And how is that working out?

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                    • #30
                      Pretty well, really. We're running maybe 6 months behind my original expectations, mostly due to (a) the learning curve for classic mesa being longer than I expected, and (b) we ended up needing one more step in the rearchitecture effort than I had planned for. I was planning on just needing "old stack" and "new stack", but the realities of getting new code into the kernel meant that a third stack, the "radeon rewrite" effort, was required.

                      The Evergreen changes were also more time-consuming than we planned -- the programming model changes were pretty much as expected but there was also a clean-up of the registers and bitfields, which was good for the hardware but bad for our plans to use a largely unchanged 6xx/7xx driver. There were also enough changes to the register specs that the nice simple IP review plan (diff the old and new register spec docs then review the relatively small diff) didn't work out so good in practice.

                      Other than that, I guess things worked out more or less as expected - with the usual mix of good and bad along the way.
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