RadeonHD 1.2.2 & 1.2.3 Drivers Released

The last release of the xf86-video-radeonhd driver was version 1.2.1 and that happened back in April. Since then we have seen a plethora of new work go into this open-source ATI driver for the Radeon R500 series and later. We've seen the driver add support for AMD's 780G Chipset and most notably it has adopted AtomBIOS to be used on the Radeon HD 4800 series and newer. There have also been numerous other improvements to this driver that currently competes with the xf86-video-ati driver. With much of this work now being settled, the Novell development team has released the RadeonHD 1.2.2 driver. In addition, they pushed out the RadeonHD 1.2.3 driver just moments later, which introduces their Command Submission infrastructure.

The RadeonHD 1.2.2 driver adds the needed mode-setting support for ATI/AMD's numerous GPUs that have been released since April -- namely the Radeon HD 4000 series. This is also the first RadeonHD release that has DRI (Direct Rendering Infrastructure) support for the ATI R500 and RS600 series. Furthermore, there is the X-Video / TexturedVideo support, CP-based (Command Processor) 2D acceleration, EXA Render acceleration, support for scaled modes, RandR support for backlight controls, and various other fixes. This driver is a big step forward from the previous 1.2.1 release.

The RadeonHD 1.2.3 driver delivers their Command Submission (CS) infrastructure. The Command Submission infrastructure supports using the DRM CP (Command Processor) and MMIO. In doing this, the XAA and EXA code for 2D acceleration had to be altered along with the X-Video / TexturedVideo implementation. The Command Submission support has been in a branch of the RadeonHD driver since this past July.

Today's releases are the first to come after marking the one-year anniversary of an open-source ATI last month. The RadeonHD 1.2.2 release announcement and source-code can be found here along with the 1.2.3 announcement.

We have been told that the RadeonHD 1.3.0 release will appear once all of this work has been stabilized. For those using the RadeonHD driver, it is definitely recommended that you upgrade. Share your thoughts on the open-source ATI efforts in the Phoronix Forums. When it comes to 3D work for the R600 and R700 series, it is sadly not there yet. There is reliable R500 3D support but AMD has yet to release the needed 3D documentation and right now, all of their development work is going on within a private code repository.