Status on AMD Drivers?

[Luc Verhaegen]

On Mon, Jan 07, 2008 at 11:15:12AM -0700, Chad wrote:
> Hello Xorg developers!
> 
> I've been eyeballing a board with an AMD 690G chipset for quite some
> time and am just curious what the status is on the "new" open drivers
> (radeonhd).  Specifically I'm looking to use it as a media board and
> am wondering what it's HDTV capabilities are (720p 1080i/p)?  In
> comparison I currently use an Nvidia 6150 based board (using closed
> source Nvidia binary blob) and am able to output full 1920x1080
> resolution on it and only use about 30% of an AMD 3200+ AM2 (single
> core) CPU.  I'm hoping for similar results, but am just curious for
> now what the status currently is.  I have seen:
> http://www.x.org/wiki/radeonhd
> 
> And maybe it says it somewhere, but I don't see information about my
> above hopefuls.  Also I do see that it mentions the HDMI and Component
> are not working yet; does that also include DVI, and either way, any
> ideas on when those might be working?
> 
> Thanks again!
> 
> -Chad

We do not have sufficient information at the moment to acceptably 
detect a dvi->hdmi dongle or a dvi->component dongle. We also do not 
have all the necessary bits to support the TV encoder at this time.

I hope that in time we will get there, but right now it is not a big 
priority, especially since after the initial driver startup phase in 
august, all talk of TV died off as all initial requests for more 
information on it were left unanswered. Only recently is this being 
brought up again.

All we have now is some vague and unproven idea of where the tv encoder 
would slot in in the r5xx/r6xx modesetting model, and that we need to 
fully depend on at least one atombios call to properly set it up. 
Chances are that we will not get sufficient information for anything 
beyond that.

As for HDMI, we are working with one of suse alsa developers to see what 
needs to happen to get the sound working properly. If it really is as 
simple as the rather obscure description in the documentation seems to 
be (check for yourself, it is in the CNTL of digital blocks), all we 
need to do is be able to find out whether this is a monitor which is 
capable of accepting hdmi audio.

If you do not need hdmi audio, then it should just work.

Luc Verhaegen.
SUSE/Novell X Driver Developer.