Update On The HD 6000 Series Open-Source Support
![AMD](/assets/categories/amd.webp)
- With the Radeon HD 6000 series, mode-setting support is only provided by KMS (kernel mode-setting). There is no longer any user-space mode-setting (UMS) code paths being worked on. There will remain UMS support for pre-NI hardware right now, but going forward we are entering a KMS-only world. This is nice as most users no longer have technical problems getting KMS working and overall it provides a better experience.
- As the Mesa support for the "Northern Islands" GPUs isn't too invasive, it's already landed in the Mesa 7.10 branch therefore it will hit a release status in the coming days. It's no longer waiting around for Mesa 7.11, but we still will be doing that for the Cayman support in the next few months.
- The DRM kernel patches aren't too invasive either. While they won't be in the mainline tree until the Linux 2.6.38 kernel, there's a likelihood that Canonical and other distribution vendors will be back-porting this support to their Linux 2.6.37 distributions. If this is done, we may see the support in Ubuntu 11.04, etc.
- The DRM patches now provide the support for the DCE5 display block on the new AMD Radeon GPUs, which allows for improved color correction, HDMI 1.4a, and DisplayPort 1.2.
- The Gallium3D support for the Radeon HD 6000 "Northern Islands" ASICs has already landed now too, complementing the classic R600c Mesa driver support.
- There is X-Video acceleration support too, albeit still no VA-API / VDPAU capabilities.
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