AMD's John Bridgman on Radeon, Linux and Open Source 3D

Friday 30th November 2007, 08:08:00 AM, written by Geo

Intrigued by recent goings on in the ATI Radeon world regarding Linux and Open Source, we asked AMD for a pow-wow on the subject. John Bridgman from the Software Development Engineering Group stepped up to the plate to answer our questions.
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Tagging

ati ± linux, open, source, orca, opengl


Latest Thread Comments (7 total)
Posted by Tim Murray on Friday, 30-Nov-07 18:33:44 UTC
The UVD answers are interesting, although I have to wonder how much of that is due to a lack of any licensed players for Blu-ray or HD-DVD under Linux.

Posted by Geo on Friday, 30-Nov-07 21:11:38 UTC
I wonder what "significantly smaller" will turn out to be re new gen initial Linux driver releases gap vs Windows?

I nearly linked this as an example of the gruesome past somewhere in the body: http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=28627

But decided out of consideration for Pete's new role not to. :razz:

Still, that one turned out to be 6 months. Ouuuuuch. Personally, while simultaneous would be great and ought to be the target, I'd think even 4-6 weeks after initial availability would be liveable for most folks.

Posted by Frank on Friday, 30-Nov-07 23:34:41 UTC
We should try and bring the OpenSource developers into this discussion, I think.

Posted by Geo on Saturday, 01-Dec-07 00:51:21 UTC
Quoting Frank
We should try and bring the OpenSource developers into this discussion, I think.
Good idea. Anybody know some to invite to the discussion?

Posted by bridgman on Saturday, 01-Dec-07 02:23:23 UTC
You should be able to find them on freenode IRC.

On #radeonhd libv, egbert and emmes are the primary developers of the new radeonhd driver.

On #radeon, agd5f and airlied are the primary maintainers of the pre-5xx radeon driver, which has now started to pick up 5xx/6xx support as well.

Posted by TimothyFarrar on Monday, 31-Dec-07 18:19:58 UTC
Quote
We originally felt that we would need to provide an open source assembler (or at least provide a lot of support while one is being written) but it is possible that the Tungsten Graphics enhancements to Mesa will fill the need using LLVM.
Kind of scary to think that a driver for a graphics card with DirectX 10 (and 10.1 in later models) level hardware would be resorting to using LLVM to run-time compile shaders to run on the CPU.

Posted by MfA on Monday, 31-Dec-07 23:09:40 UTC
I don't think that's quite what he was suggesting, Tungsten Graphics are actually using LLVM to generate code to run on GPUs. Intel for the moment, but since the R600 ISA is open now they could presumably do the same for that.


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