Back at the Red Hat Summit, Henri Richard said that AMD (and the former ATI) were going to come up with a plan to better support open source. Today we see the results of that promise and I have to say I’m incredibly impressed with the commitment that they have decided to make. I know that this was a struggle inside of AMD and I want to send a personal thanks to the people who worked hard to make this a reality. They deserve full credit and our thanks.
OK, to the meat of the story. AMD is making the commitment to do two major things:
- To develop of a fully functional 2D and 3D driver that supports all of their newer radeon chipsets. This will be done in full collaboration with the open source community and will have the direct participation of hackers from companies like Red Hat and Novell.
- To release documentation that anyone can use to build and support drivers for their chips.
In my mind it’s the release of documentation that’s most interesting and telling about the commitment. These guys are clearly doing the right thing and are going even further than Intel in their support of open source. It’s not just about the having drivers, it’s also about having the ability to work independently of the company in your development and decision making. Docs make that possible and are a great symptom of the way that they are thinking about how to interact with the open source community.
In my mind end users turn out to be the biggest winners in this story. The binary driver that AMD/ATI has today will continue to live on and be supported. But that doesn’t matter because the goal wasn’t to stop the evil binary driver makers. The goal was to create a great out of the box experience for people who want to use distributions like Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And what this means is that we can finally do this on ATI hardware across the board.
It’s also a huge win for those of us who understand that supporting end users and creating great experiences means having open source up and down the stack. For those of us who have been involved in the Fedora project, not including and supporting binary drivers has been painful. It destroyed our user base versus those who would be so quick to give up that flexibility for the sake of some short term gain. But we stuck to our guns and said “No, we can’t innovate in that model. That doesn’t scale and takes away our ability to move quickly. You will have to do better.” And it meant that in some small way we were able to drive the discussion to a place where open source becomes part of the answer instead of part of the problem. It turns it into an opportunity for growth. For those of you who stuck with us through the hard times in Fedora, we thank you. It was worth it and everyone who uses Linux, Fedora or not, will benefit.
It will take a while for the driver to turn from a framework into something useful. And it will take a while for all of the documentation to get published as well. (I hear the 2D docs will come first, followed after a period of time by the 3D docs.) So people will have to be patient. But they have made the commitment and decision to do the right thing. So, once again, thanks to the people inside of AMD who made this happen. We’re looking forward to working with you.
Update: Have a look at Dave Arlie’s post for some more specific information about how things have been moving to date.
Update: From Daniel Stone:
Matthew Tippett just threw a CD full of AMD/ATI specs to Dave Airlie, approved for public release with no NDA. I’m now holding one of those CDs as well. Thanks, AMD.
In the past five hours, we’ve pushed 72,000 PDFs, for a total of around 1TB. This … turns out to actually push the limits of our new fd.o setup.
Pingback: AMD/ATI: finalmente buoni driver per Linux e supporto ad AIGLX (Compiz) « pollycoke :)
wohhooooo!
Great news!
My next graphic card will be an AMD/ATI one! :-).
Wow. This is nice!
I can not wait for this. Being an ATI user (laptop) this is very good news.
Miguel.
Excellent news! The situation with the ATI drivers has been a constant source of problems for people using linux on the desktop.
And here I was feeling ashamed about buying ATI when I got my new iMac… This is awesome news!
Calm down, we have seen stuff like this before, however did not happen.
When specs and excellent drivers are available we can celebrate, not now.
This is just talk.
I have to agree with Ole. Check out this link:http://airlied.livejournal.com/43520.html
If ATI was commited to free drivers, then I don’t know why the announcement today didn’t include a note to Mr Airlie saying “Go ahead and publish your fix.” Right now, they look to me like big fat liars.
I’m going to head off all this crankiness right now. The AMD guys are serious and they are acting. This isn’t just talk, there’s real meat behind it.
I would prefer something tangible but a commitment is already very good news.
I seriously doubt they are just going to cross their arms after this announcement, it would be a pretty bad strategy.
I have to admit after reading this I was excited… for all of 10 seconds.
My next PC will be running an Intel GPU, and no amount of vapourware and lies from ATi will change that.
Pingback: Free Software Stuff - AMD/ATI otvara specifikacije grafičkih kartica
Pingback: » Ati Linux Driver + Compiz: ora è realtà - Gianbi Zone Blog
… and there was much rejoicing !
Seriously, does anyone have a rough estimation for the “It will take a while for the driver to turn from a framework into something useful” ?
Pingback: Joao Barros » AMD to open up graphics specs
AMD and ATI (before the merger) were two very different companies. AMD was very open about how to program their devices and ATI was just the opposite. Big picture is that AMD now owns ATI and they are calling the shots. I also beleive that AMD management believes that continued openness is in their best interest.
It took a while for things to settle from the merger and having been through several mergers myself (two of these were bigger than the AMD/ATI merger) I would have expected it to be about this long before their internal post merger politics had settled out enough that they would be able to make this kind of move.
So now the other shoe has dropped and AMD has officially made the commitment. AMD has a long history of working with the OSS community and they have people who work on the Linux kernel and on other OSS projects to support their hardware. I am sure that there could still be some resistance from some parts of the ATI branch of the company that could slow things down. But I have a feeling that if this occurs that AMD will deal with it and make corrections as needed.
As to how long it will take for this to result in a working OSS driver. It will be a while since writing one of these drivers is non-trivial. But there are a significant number of developers who are currently working on the Avivo (IE R300 – R500) and the existing R200 drivers that could probably make very good progress with the hardware specs in hand. Once those specs are available I would expect that the Avivo driver will start seeing the affects with in the first week or two but that it will likely take 3 to 6 months before things stabilize on something that is close to a full featured 3D driver.
We will know more in the next few weeks about how fast AMD will start up this process. But I have a feeling, in part because of how long it took them to make the announcement, that they had their ducks pretty much lined up and ready to go before they make the announcement.
Pingback: Novità da AMD/ATi per i driver GNU/Linux « Ispirazioni informatiche
Pingback: Zone of Mr. Frosti » Blog Archive » AMD to Open Source drivers
Pingback: New ATI drivers for Linux !! - TechEnclave
I’m mildly annoyed that they explicitly specify that it’s only their newer hardware, but then again, the stuff older than r500 mostly has decent support. I want some love for my Mobility Radeon 9600 =|
That’s so great. I’m suffering from the awful ATI drivers on my notebook and am really looking forward to free drivers with better performance and features that the Xorg ati driver.
Pingback: AMD announces plans to open up ATI graphics drivers · TechBlogger
and what about older chipset such as radeon 9000 series?
Well… If they really do open source their driver… My next card will be – AMD ATI!!!!
Pingback: BlogNerds.com » Blog Archive » AMD announces plans to open up ATI graphics drivers
Talk is cheap. Until the docs are downloadable and verified as reasonably accurate, this is just marketing hype.
Pingback: Technical world - All about technical things » AMD announces plans to open up ATI graphics drivers
Pingback: Websites Reviewer » Blog Archive » AMD announces plans to open up ATI graphics drivers
I do credit Fedora and Redhat for sticking to their guns. Although I have had to install another distribution on my main laptop because of the poor ATI support, I’m glad that Fedora did not cave in and now we will have open source drivers fro the X1400 and similar chipsets. Hopefully by F9 I will be able to install Fedora on the lappy as well. Thanks!
Chris,
Your move is admirable. I apologise for all the negative publicity I gave ATI because the drivers _used to be_ so so poor (I use ATI cards).
Pingback: AMD verbessert Open-Source-Grafiktreiber für Linux » at HDTV Space
Pingback: Más info de la liberación de los drivers de AMD/ATI « Entre tuxes y pepinos
great, my next gpu will be AMD/ATI :-)
Maybe this can bring us back to a good old times, when every pc server board had an ATI chip onboard … and it just worked :)
http://www.pledgebank.com/open3d
Pingback: ATI macht weiter Druck at Naji-Dev
Pingback: OSNote » AMD: Unterstützung für die Entwicklung freier 3D-Linux-Treiber
Pingback: kernel panic in userspace » amd/ati
Pingback: kernel panic in userspace » amd/ati
Pingback: a promise of full specs for R500+ from AMD/ATI at Off you go… into the purple yonder!
Pingback: Open source graphics drivers for ATI chips « Amused Cynicism
This is a first… I’m amazed that big vendors like ATI and Intel are starting to support open-source drivers (in Intel’s case, the iwlwifi drivers) rather than rely on proprietary solutions. What’s in it for them? Maybe it’s just that they’re being lazy bums that would rather have open-source devs work on drivers rather than do it themselves. If that’s the case, then it’s a win-win-win situation for the vendors, driver maintainers, and end users. :)
Blogospam, on the other hand…
Pingback: Christopher Blizzard » Blog Archive » a new road for AMD and ATI « Wolf’s Geek Blog
If this really happens i’ll eat my own words and buy my first ATI card. Hell must have frozen over. This is great though.
Well I just wanna remind all thos “great news w00w00″-guys here that NOTHING was released yet. COmpanies fooled developers and promised %anything to get a positiv PR!
They said they wanna open the 3D Docs later but who ensures you this? Maybe they’ll switch their mind and we’ll get just 2D (if even) again.
I strongly DO NOT TRUST their words ‘course they’ve lied simply too much.
If they would be serious about it why sheduling the release of the 3D Specs/Docs? Is there ANY reason?
If they’re so serious about it why not HIRING some developers to get a OpenSource Xorg Driver wich is FREE and WITHOUT NDA SHIT (nor magic-register-bla nobody knows about!) as fast as possible to competete nvidia finaly?
I remember AMD said somewhere that they’ll free the ATI Specs after they overtook the company.. well I’m still using a old Radeon 9200SE because it IS SUPPORTED BY Xorg and I don’t need a binary blob to use WHAT I PAID FOR.
I wish you guys would stop joining the hype and calm DOWN.
WE HAVE NOTHING so there’s no reason to say “Good dudes we love ya!”.
AMD has to proove it’s not lieing and they’ve to proof they’re serious about it and this ASAP.
If they would be serious about it they would have droped their binary driver for “linux” (hey I’m using a BSD and NO LINUX… nothing against Linux but binary is binary…) and would do everything wich is needed to get a much better (their code is UGLY LIKE HELL, it’s totaly rotten and NOT DOCUMENTED! It’s just poor… rly! :/ ) driver in ~6 weeks.
Just my 0.2 USD with some experience….
As long as nothing changes my Radeon 9200 wont change…. so I just give a fuck about “your” announcements ‘course companies fooled us (end users) far too much and far too long already.
will they be freeing the specs to the older radeon cards as well? the r300 project has done pretty well with the reverse engineering, but it’d be nice if they could get the driver perfect..
Pingback: FOSS Field » Blog Archive » AMD plans to open documentation for its graphics chips
Wow… cause there’s this huge userbase of Linux games on the market…? I’m sure that Call of Duty 4 and Crysis is going to be available and PLAYABLE on any linux box…
I would say that most of the people using Linux are the real geeks, and they probably have no other purpose in life other than to write drivers and commit their time to the Open Source community… those folks playing games on linux do so with older games… but then again, I don’t know anything about that since I’m one of the Microsoft Slaves.
I just don’t see how this is going to make a huge impact other than MAYBE making software developers START thinking about coding games for Linux also… cause I don’t think that Whine is all that efficient that it’ll be able to run a game like crysis with all the bells and whistles like a regular Microsoft box…
Pingback: Clowns In My Coffee » Coincidence?
Pingback: OSZine
Awesome. The announcement as it is, is just another indicator of the impact of GNU/Linux and open source.
I have an ATI videocard in my laptop, and it works fine with Ubuntu. But I’m still delighted to see this. More of such support means a better brighter future for the penguin.
Today the only wireless cards I by are open-source-friendly cards based on the RAlink chipset. They work much better than the closed-source cards I’ve used. And the only graphics cards I will buy are by ATI; I expect great things to happen for Linux because of this.