Radeon Driver Rewrite Only Has A Few Things Left

Back in February we talked about the work that David Airlie is doing to rewrite the ATI Radeon driver for Mesa. Soon now it looks like this rewritten code may land in the mainline Mesa code-base once a few more items are addressed. The rewrite of this open-source ATI 3D support brings buffer management support for all supported ATI hardware, DRI2, Frame Buffer Objects, and all of this work is a prerequisite for having kernel memory management (such as with GEM).

David Airlie shares on his blog that he has been working on getting the rewritten ATI driver branch into a useful state and recently has been focusing on the FBO support under a DRI2 and kernel mode-setting enabled environment. Today he has reached a point where the Frame Buffer Object support has been merged into the radeon-rewrite branch.

Still left to be accomplished is fixing some hanging issues in the buffer management code for R100/200 hardware, broken depth buffer on the R200 series, incorrect drawing with the DRI2 single buffered rendering, and Piglit regression test running. There may also he a few other items to be addressed too prior to the code being merged.

After the code has been merged, Airlie plans to work on color buffer tiling under KMS/DRI2 (it will work right now with the DRI1 environment) and texture tiling. Hopefully we will see this Radeon rewrite merged into Mesa prior to Mesa 7.5, which is also the first release that will incorporate Gallium3D support.