News ATI drivers

[Luca]

On 9/6/07, Vinicius Santos <vininim at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/5/07, Hal V. Engel <hvengel at astound.net> wrote:
> > On Wednesday 05 September 2007 11:02:32 Erik Andrén wrote:
> > > Hello,
> > >
> > > Xavier Bestel wrote:
> > > > Hi all,
> > > >
> > > > as everyone has probably seen already, AMD just publicly promised specs
> > > > and a reference driver for all cards starting with R500. Great.
> > >
> > > Source?
> >
> > I was wondering the same thing.  Doing some googling I found:
> >
> > http://lwn.net/Articles/248227/
>
> Updated source:
> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=826

<quote>
The library that is being open-sourced by AMD is for their ATOM BIOS.
The ATOM BIOS is shared between the video BIOS and the proprietary
driver to act as an interpreter for handling some calls across their
newer generations of graphics cards. As described by Matthew Tippett
of the AMD Graphics Products Group, "The library reads tables from the
BIOS and provides effective firmware processes for programming
hardware".
</quote>

The "tables" part is clear (PLL, TMDS/LVDS, connectors, maybe other
stuff), but I don't get the rest... does it means that instead of
feeding commands to the CP the new driver will call into the BIOS
(vm86?) to program the card?

Luca