Mailinglist Archive: radeonhd (265 mails)

["Alex Deucher" <alexdeucher@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Jan 28, 2008 8:23 AM, Louise Hoffman <louise.hoffman@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > The R5xx and R6xx support in radeon is purely a private project of two
> > people, redhat's Dave Airlie and ATIs Alex Deucher. This started in
> > november, and copied a lot of radeonhd code. None of this happened in an
> > amicable fashion, and there is no cooperation. What label you want to
> > stick to this is up to you.
>
> So the R5xx and R6xx drivers are made without the specs from AMD?

The code was written based on the ATOM parser from AMD and the wrapper
from radeonhd.

> > What i can tell you is that AMD and SUSE are continuing their close
> > cooperating on the radeonhd driver, on providing providing support for
> > new hardware and on further features and functionality. We are providing
> > the best technical solution, for a driver that will be solid and long
> > lasting, requiring a minimal maintainance burden in the long term. We do
> > not cut corners to be able to make big claims.
>
> As a end user, what does than mean? Will Red Hat users use "their"
> driver and Suse use their, or does the two projects focus on different
> things?

The two projects had different goals.  Dave and I wanted to play with
ATOMBIOS and to take advantage of the existing functionality that is
already supported in the radeon driver (2D/3D accel, drm/command
process support, etc.).  ATOMBIOS is a set of card specific tables and
scripts that can be used to program certain functions on the chip.
This includes setting modes, routing crtcs, dpms, initializing the
chip, etc.  ATOMBIOS provides a common API to perform these functions.
 The x86 bios, the windows driver, fglrx, etc., use these scripts to
program the card.  This makes it much easier to bring up new asics and
program the chips.  ATOM allowed Dave and I to get the driver up
quickly so we could start to play with things like 2D and 3D, using
the command processor, etc. since much of that works unchanged on
newer chips.  Down the road I'd like to see one code base, but it will
take some work and time of course.  We'll get there eventually.

Alex
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