News ATI drivers

[Luc Verhaegen]

On Fri, Sep 14, 2007 at 02:44:59PM +0200, Xavier Bestel wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-09-14 at 09:38 +0100, Daniel Stone wrote:
> > On Fri, Sep 14, 2007 at 10:00:28AM +0200, Xavier Bestel wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2007-09-13 at 19:47 -0400, Alex Deucher wrote:
> > > > on r5xx the 2D accelerator is the same as the older radeons.
> > > 
> > > Strange. I swear I saw Xorg people say the 2D accelerator was gone on
> > > r500.
> > 
> > r5xx introduces a new modesetting engine but has a 2D engine still, and
> > a 3D engine based upon r3xx/r4xx.  r6xx has a brand new 3D engine, and
> > gets rid of the 2D engine.  Also, I believe the video overlay was
> > removed in r5xx, but then re-added in r6xx.
> 
> So the r5xx looks more like an r3xx/r4xx than an r6xx. Why not putting
> all the r5xx code into the -ati driver and creating another driver for
> the r6xx ?

Have you, as a developer, been near xf86-video-ati recently?

I do not want another driver in there, especially now that we have 
libpciaccess. For instance, and this is a rather trivial one to solve, 
our driver can be loaded on its own.

We're still discussing how to solve this, but this is all kind of 
academic when we still don't have the documentation and aren't even 
talking about this documentation yet. Let's get the current stuff all 
resolved first.

The last thing we want to do though is pull an NIH, we are not into 
uselessly wasting time here.

Luc Verhaegen.
(the first person to scale Mount AtiProbe)