AMD Gets Back To Working On The Geode Linux Driver

Martin-Éric Racine has just announced the release candidate of the X.Org Geode 2.11.9 driver in preparations for the X.Org 7.6 Katamari. The AMD Geode driver is not to be confused with the AMD/ATI Radeon drivers for Linux, but rather this is the driver Geode GX and Geode LX embedded SoC such as what's used by the One-Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. When announcing this driver, Martin-Éric has shared that AMD engineers are back to actually contributing work towards this driver.

The X.Org Geode driver has long been around, but it doesn't receive as much work as the more widely used ATI Radeon, Intel, and Nouveau drivers. Jordan Crouse of AMD used to work on this driver, but some two years ago his position was axed during cutbacks at Advanced Micro Devices. During the past two years it's just been left up to the open-source community to maintain this driver, but AMD is now back to the table as they have two engineers, Hunk Cui and Frank Huang, from the AMD China team contributing towards the project. These two AMD engineers were not previously involved with the open-source AMD/ATI efforts, but in fact come from entirely different departments, so there's no worries that the open-source Radeon driver work will be setback in anyway.

When it comes to the X.Org Geode 2.11.9 driver, some of the changes to be found are fixing rendering regressions and updating their code-base against the current X.Org best practices for development. Most of the work was targeted towards the Geode LX component, but the GX2 component of the driver will be of greater focus during their next development cycle.

Details on this Linux work for the AMD Geode graphics can be found in this X.Org mailing list message. In this message, AMD's Frank Huang talks about the ongoing work that they are doing to improve the rendering within this open-source hardware driver.