AMD Radeon HD 2000 Series & Linux

The R600 series has integrated HDMI with audio support, but on a standard Fedora 7 install it was detected as an unknown device. AMD's Wolke Liu has, however, released a patch for ATI RS780 and R600 HDMI audio support under ALSA.

With the open-source Avivo driver not yet having proper R600 support and the official fglrx driver only containing partial support without OpenGL acceleration, right now AMD R600 owners are bound to using the VESA driver. The AMD Radeon HD 2900XT was introduced on May 14 while the AMD Radeon HD 2400 and HD 2600 series were introduced only recently on June 28. Official support for the R600 series will likely not arrive in the fglrx driver for a few more months, which is very disheartening, and when the open-source Avivo driver will provide any R600 support is currently not known. We hope that this will not turn into another Radeon X1000 (R500) support debacle where it had taken ATI six months to provide basic Linux support. We will report back when anything changes, but right now Linux users will want to avoid the Radeon HD 2000 series at all costs until there is adequate support for alternative operating systems.

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