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.
