As the license is the same, I think it's obvious that these two projects should merge at some point, if there isn't a reason not to do so. Isn't it?. 2008/1/28, Alex Deucher <alexdeucher@gmail.com>:
On Jan 28, 2008 8:23 AM, Louise Hoffman <louise.hoffman@gmail.com> 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.
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-- Néstor Amigo Cairo +34 687 96 74 81 nestorac@gmail.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: radeonhd+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: radeonhd+help@opensuse.org