AMD to open up graphics specs [LWN.net]

A quick report from the kernel summit: AMD's representative at the summit has announced that the company has made a decision to enable the development of open source drivers for all of its (ATI) graphics processors from the R500 going forward. There will be specifications available and a skeleton driver as well; a free 2D driver is anticipated by the end of the year. The rest will have to be written; freeing of the existing binary-only driver is not in the cards, and "that is better for everybody." Things are looking good on this front. More in the kernel summit report to come.

Update: Christopher Blizzard has posted some more information about what AMD is doing.

to post comments

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 15:25 UTC (Wed) by asamardzic (guest, #27161) [Link] (20 responses)

WOOHOO! Kudos for persistence of everyone involved from our side, and kudos to AMD.

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 15:43 UTC (Wed) by ewan (guest, #5533) [Link] (19 responses)

That's still not nearly as good as Intel's approach of writing Free
drivers in-house and employing major X hackers. A change of attitude
from 'We will actively screw you' to 'You're on your own' is certainly an
improvement, but it's quite a way short of kudos-worthy.

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 15:47 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (6 responses)

"You're on your own" is not the position I heard here - sorry if my posting made that impression. AMD intends to actively help with this process. If they follow through (and one assumes they will) there is little to complain about here.

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 15:54 UTC (Wed) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]

It's definitely not a 'you're on your own' kind of proposition: this is exactly what was asked for, giving the community all the information it needs to complete a proper driver.

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 16:11 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (2 responses)

Even if they do follow through, it remains to be seen if the community will manage to produce a fully-fonctionnal driver out of this. Last time ATI played this card the result was somewhat lacking.

AMD is to be commended if this happens, but a FLOSS driver won't happen overnight. And its silicon is said to be a lot less nice to play with than NVidia's.

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 22:17 UTC (Wed) by AJWM (guest, #15888) [Link] (1 responses)

A few years back ATI did release specs, the ATI 9200/9250 series (G200?) is the highest for which they did so.

I have a 9250 card and the FLOSS drivers work pretty well for it, including 3D acceleration (such as the card is capable of).

There are already FLOSS drivers for the later cards, based largely on reverse-engineering. With the specs available they should catch up pretty quickly.

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 23:49 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Sorta.

They released it under NDA and only to certain people.

Same thing with Intel. From what I remember Intel originally farmed out development to Tungsten Graphics and then brought them into the fold.

Intel's graphics are definately open source, but they aren't as open as they should be. I bought lots of Intel hardware because of this and I've recommended it to other people.

Intel did a good thing releasing source code, but like most things everybody does, it can get better.

(to the other people: )
THIS IS GOOD NEWS!!

Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, this is the BEST thing you could hope to get!

The ATI proprietary drivers are going to be a minefield of nasty NDA agreements, cross licensing and all sorts of other stuff. Companies involved in those drivers are going to be numbered in the dozens. SGI, Microsoft, Nvidia, S3, etc etc. Some of them are very anti-open source, very pro-patents in their legal stances. Some of them have sold their patents and copyright assists to other companies, the legality of everything is going to be very uncertain.

In other words: The drivers are not AMD's to give away. Realise that the legal/political issues revolving around closed source can screw over developers as much as end users. (Free software is about liberating both the user and the developer.)

So in order to give away the source code to the drivers AMD needs to make new drivers. If they are going to open source it, then why not get 3rd party developers involved from the start?

Makes sense to me!!!

Ra-ra-ra Open source is starting to win in the 3D graphics arena.

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 16:38 UTC (Wed) by ewan (guest, #5533) [Link]

I read "a skeleton driver as well [...] The rest will have to be written" as 'written by people outside of and unsupported by ATI/AMD'. Which is a bit of a leap, but not an entirely unfounded one given the history.

You're there though, and I'm not, and I'm very happy to believe that I'm wrong. I certainly hope I am.

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 7, 2007 18:51 UTC (Fri) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]

http://airlied.livejournal.com/50187.html

It's definitely more than what you say. AMD is giving access to the engineering staff to help out, as well as working to clear out old NDA issues and help get code out there. This isn't just a vaporware promise, as code has already been worked on under the new model before this public announcement.

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 15:53 UTC (Wed) by xav (guest, #18536) [Link] (2 responses)

Maybe, but open specs is all that was asked by the driver community since ages. And now, AMD gives specs *and* a minimal reference driver. They must be commended for that.

Of course, Intel's way is yet better. But look at the bright side: NVIDIA is now the only one to keep closed hardware, the status-quo between them and ATI is over and they'll probably have to do something about it one day.

All in all, very very good news.

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 20:28 UTC (Wed) by hitmark (guest, #34609) [Link] (1 responses)

also, as ati is a major player when it comes to laptop graphics, and dell specifically called for something like this, its win win for everyone imo.

hell, if amd plays its cards right, it may well be able to get dell to use their cpus and similar in the laptops rather then intel.

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 22:22 UTC (Wed) by Zenith (guest, #24899) [Link]

This is actually a quite interesting take on the matter.

If things turn out this way, AMD have made quite a case for using their CPUs and GPUs, so let us hope Dell sees things the same way.

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 15:56 UTC (Wed) by Thalience (subscriber, #4217) [Link] (3 responses)

While I certainly do appreciate Intel's significant contributions to X (both their driver and the infrastructure work to support it), they have not released full documentation for their chips.

A driver written under NDA is far better than no driver, but a full release of documentation is better still.

Of course, it remains to be seen just how complete this documentation release will be.

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 17:01 UTC (Wed) by vonbrand (guest, #4458) [Link] (2 responses)

Apropos drivers written under NDA, I know of a case where the developers of a driver got specs only under an NDA. They assumed the specs would be full of detailed, third-party data. Far from that, it was a hastily thrown together bunch of loose sheets, with handwritten amendments and margin notes. They speculated later that the NDA was just out of shame ;-)

I've also heard from cases where the specs just don't exist at all: All there is is the experience of the people that developed the hardware and drivers, plus an unorganized list of "this works", "this doesn't", with lots of gaps.

Just look at what is done kernel-wise: The talks from LinuxConf.eu about user-kernel interface that Jon reported on are precisely about there not being enough documentation on (new) system calls...

Hardware without Specifications

Posted Sep 5, 2007 19:23 UTC (Wed) by jwmittag (guest, #43097) [Link] (1 responses)

I've also heard from cases where the specs just don't exist at all: All there is is the experience of the people that developed the hardware and drivers, plus an unorganized list of "this works", "this doesn't", with lots of gaps.

Dirk Hohndel, Intel's Open Source Guy, mentioned something like this in his LinuxTag 2005 Talk. Essentially, the guys writing the Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 Linux driver had to reverse engineer just like everyone else would have, even though they are also Intel engineers.

jwm

Remember their slogan ...

Posted Sep 6, 2007 1:33 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

"Only the paranoid survive" is Intel's motto (and their competitors feel much the same way).

A lot of the big chip designers don't trust their own people with the company's own designs; everything is need-to-know. And then there are all of the details of operation that simply aren't written down anywhere; the driver guys ask the hardware guys questions when they get stuck, and sometimes comments in the driver is pretty much the only documentation for some of the tricky bits, other than comments in the (Verilog or VHDL) RTL source code, and there's no way anyone's going to get to see that.

Good for them!

Posted Sep 5, 2007 16:05 UTC (Wed) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link]

Hey, we Open-source/Free software advocates have got to take any good news we can get relating to a vendor opening up specifications to a previously-proprietary hardware device (generally speaking). Besides, who doesn't suppose the Community can/will code a graphics driver that might even be better than ATI's in-house version? (Not meant to impugn the expertise of ATI's engineering team.)

But, more importantly, this sets a precedent for other hardware manufacturers to follow, in general. Kudos to ATI.

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 17:45 UTC (Wed) by gravious (guest, #7662) [Link]

Though in general a pessimist and quite skeptical in nature I cannot agree with you Ewan. I believe one of the major bug-bears of the FOSS crowd for some time has been lack of hardware specs for graphics chipsets. Intel is to be commended in the way they have approached this area and are rightly reaping the benefits of their openness. Even though AMD/ATI may only be responding to Intel's moves out of fear the end result is that the consumer wins. We are now in a situation where 2 out of 3 of the largest graphics chipset vendors are (or very soon will be) working in a manner compatible with our ethos. Every step in the right direction must be applauded. We must be vocal in our support of those that help us. Let's reserve our cynicism for the future, today let us praise AMD for their foresight.

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 21:14 UTC (Wed) by dark (guest, #8483) [Link]

Actually, "we will supply specs" is all I ask for. In some ways it's even better than getting a driver. If we write a driver to the specs, and it works, then we know the specs are good. We'll know everything we need to maintain that driver. By contrast, a driver from the vendor will have been based partly on undocumented in-house knowledge.

I don't think hardware vendors should feel pressured to supply a Linux driver. That's a lot of hassle and it will discourage them from supporting Linux at all. Just the specs, please.

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 6, 2007 10:31 UTC (Thu) by ljt (guest, #33337) [Link]

What I hear instead is "from now on, we release early and often" along with "code _and_ spec".
It's even better than Intel if it really is the way it turns out.

Kudos to AMD/ATI: 'We will actively screw you' and 'You're on your own' is the message sent to Nvidia :-)

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 14, 2007 16:31 UTC (Fri) by yknott (guest, #47407) [Link]

sorry erwan but it seems not everyone is able to read your post correctly

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 15:46 UTC (Wed) by xav (guest, #18536) [Link]

Time to change that aging radeon 9600 then ...

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 16:06 UTC (Wed) by cathectic (guest, #40543) [Link] (7 responses)

Is there any news at all on R300 and/ or R400?

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 16:33 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (3 responses)

The situation with R3xx and R4xx hardware is that you can get a fairly decent basic driver from X.org, and a lot of the improvements needed are blocked by lack of developer time or hardware to test with rather than particularly by lack of documentation (although there is no official ATI/ AMD documentation for this hardware).

On a Radeon X600 mobile variant in a laptop I'm using to post this for instance I seem to have an Xv scaler and overlay (ie accelerated video playback) and enough 3D to play Quake 3 Arena adequately, though I don't have a mouse plugged in so I got my backside handed to me when I just tried it. The card should be capable of more, but not a huge amount more (mostly more features rather than better performance).

If you have an R3xx or R4xx and thought it didn't work with Free drivers, upgrade to the latest available and try it out for yourself.

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 17:02 UTC (Wed) by cathectic (guest, #40543) [Link] (2 responses)

To clarify - I am well aware of the current position regarding the reverse
engineered R300 & R400 drivers (I currently run them on my laptop with a
Mobility X700).

I would disagree with you on 3D performance though - I believe there is a
lot more that can still be done there on the free side, especially if AMD
are prepared to release the specs on these cards (also, full specs for
things like controlling PowerPlay - I know about "DynamicClocks", but
DynamicClocks != PowerPlay by a long shot).

My question was more to do with the fact that - is there any reason why
AMD cannot open up the R300 and R400 specs as well (this announcement only
says "R500 and newer" - is this an oversight, or is there some other
problem with releasing the older specs?), rather than continue to make
life more difficult that it already is for the reverse engineers and
developers?

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 17:25 UTC (Wed) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link] (1 responses)

Probably because they're not selling r300/400 hardware anymore? Or at least not enough to justify the effort of providing the specs? Remember, it's likely that there is no existing formal specification, just lots of internal e-mail between the hardware and driver developers. One can't really blame them for spending the effort on future hardware rather than "old stuff".

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 19:42 UTC (Wed) by AWJ (guest, #47173) [Link]

AMD's website still lists the X1050 and 9550 (both R300-based cards) as current products, and all of their integrated GPUs are either R300 or R400 based.

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 16:48 UTC (Wed) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link] (2 responses)

The R300/R400 have a still relatively new but from what I read now decent
native/freedomware xorg driver, in the form of the radeon driver. The
upcoming radeon driver update is, I believe, supposed to bring that to
mainline, as I don't believe it's currently stable.

FWIW, I'm running an old Radeon 92xx series, the last of the R200s with
the long time native/freedomware driver based on ATI's sponsored work
before they up and closed everything. As I don't do closed source and am
running an AMD system so Intel's integrated solution isn't an option
unless I upgraded and switched platforms (which I've been planning to do
unless AMD opened up), I've been following the R300/R400 developments with
the intention of upgrading to them when the support was in mainline, thus
my knowledge on the subject, tho it's not direct as I'm not running them
yet.

The problem with the R500 and beyond is that ATI killed the old 2D VESA
framebuffer portions of the chip -- it's all 3D, or so I've read. Thus,
even 2D was a major challenge. There has been a recent reverse
engineering project, but it was slow going. Still, ATI hasn't always been
so dead set against freedomware -- as I mentioned they actually sponsored
a third party to do the R200 series drivers.

AMD has been quite open as well, and in fact did very well selling AMD64
kit to Linux and other FLOSS users long before MS got out of beta on the
platform, so when they bought ATI, many of us had high hopes that we'd at
least get specs. Boosting them even farther was AMD's declared intent in
the graphics arena and why they bought ATI in the first place -- an intent
with teeth recently added when they announced their SSE5 stuff --
basically, they want to fully standardize a graphics/physics oriented
instruction set as an extension to x86, much as they did with
AMD64/x86_64. There are whole areas they are targeting based on this,
merging aspects of the GPU/PPU into the CPU or at least into
interpluggable sockets (using Hypertransport), and having the whole
graphics thing continue to function on closed code and closed specs just
didn't seem to jive with where they were going. Thus, many watchers,
certainly including me, were highly optimistic that AMD would open specs
eventually. It just seemed they were sure taking their time, and it was
getting rather harder to maintain optimism, at least here. OTOH, I
suppose they had a lot of internal resistance to overcome on the ATI
side...

Anyway... I've had a convenient budgeting excuse on the graphics card side
for some time, since there hasn't been a lot of freedomware driver
supporting hardware, and what there has been has been bargain bin.
However, it was getting a bit /too/ far behind for my tastes, and I was
looking to update to at least an R300 based card... but reluctantly as
reverse engineering is great, but I'd still be supporting a company that
wasn't cooperating. Now that it seems they may be cooperating, so even if
the generation I may be upgrading to is reverse engineered, I'll at least
be supporting a company cooperating with us once again.

That's certainly a good thing, as it's likely to be another couple years
before I upgrade main platform again (I'm still planning on upgrading this
thing to dual Opteron 290s, and will keep that for at least a couple
years), but I wasn't particularly liking the idea of being forced to Intel
after being an AMD guy since the K6 era, nor of supporting, even if
stop-gap, an uncooperative AMD/ATI in the mean time. It looks like AMD
may have decided to clear up those problems for me (and others like me)
now. As I said, that's a good thing! =8^)

Duncan

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 20:29 UTC (Wed) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link] (1 responses)

At least as of whatever version is in Ubuntu Feisty, the R300 driver does have some deficiencies. I have a 9600XT, and sometimes there is flickering when e.g. the screen has been shut down after running the screen saver for a while. One has to switch back to console mode and back to X which somehow resets the card again. Then there is some missing functionality in the OpenGL features; e.g. google earth is unusably slow.

At the moment I'd say the old trusty radeon 92x0 is a better choice.

Well, one can always hope that the upcoming R500 driver will kick butt.

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 6, 2007 5:54 UTC (Thu) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link]

> Then there is some missing functionality in the OpenGL features; e.g.
> google earth is unusably slow.

Try enabling the 'Disable Low-impact fallback' option in driconf.

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 16:19 UTC (Wed) by MisterIO (guest, #36192) [Link] (1 responses)

Really happy to hear this.I always preferred AMD,because of low-prices,good performances and the new 64bit architecture;after the "intel graphic chips os drivers" story I thought my next pc would have been an Intel-based one,but now,if everything goes as it should, I'm comin back to an AMD+ATI based one.

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 6, 2007 8:23 UTC (Thu) by morhippo (guest, #334) [Link]

You reflected my thoughts 100%. I have always been using AMD CPUs, but seeing that they bought ATI and no decent linux drivers were available, I was thinking about moving back to Intel (the last one was a 486-DX266, a great machine)..

How about the "rest" ?

Posted Sep 5, 2007 16:33 UTC (Wed) by mathias (guest, #40647) [Link] (1 responses)

The quick report is (for obvious reasons) very vague on the scope of specifications that will be released. To qualify as "2D driver" the only things that are needed is some basic mode setting and drawing.

That leaves out a lot of features expected from a complete driver:
* 2D acceleration (XAA, EXA ?)
* Dual output and TV-out support
* Xv & XvMC for video acceleration
* RandR for changing resolution
* and of course... 3D acceleration

Also for laptop users what's nice to have is a driver that doesn't freeze the card on suspend/resume, and the ability to switch to an external screen.

How about the "rest" ?

Posted Sep 5, 2007 17:00 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

As far as I understand it there isn't any hardware in this chipset dedicated to 2D acceleration or video acceleration. They're just considered special cases of the existing, very fast programmable 3D rendering pipeline.

If AMD provide the information needed to /properly/ set up the CRTCs (or rather their modern equivalent) and do memory management, which are both needed to have a correct "2D driver" on such hardware, then we've actually got almost everything it can do except 3D. The rest is mostly information on how to program the shaders, and quirks, known bugs etc. that save a lot of wasted time debugging problems.

The same is true for modern nVidia chipsets too. It's just not worth wasting transistors on a specialised feature like the old overlay and scaler features used in Xv video acceleration when you've got a programmable engine that can do the same things, or a million subtle variations just as easily.

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 17:02 UTC (Wed) by AWJ (guest, #47173) [Link] (4 responses)

Why R500 and up? What's the deal with that? All of AMD's current integrated GPUs are R300 or R400-based...

Is it a case of "everything about the R300/R400 that the community doesn't already know via REing is just a subset of the R500"?

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 17:31 UTC (Wed) by pkern (subscriber, #32883) [Link] (3 responses)

In my laptop there's a X1400 (sadly enough; the sadness may well disappear when there is a free driver), and that's a R530. (ThinkPad FWIW; and I know quite some others which have a R5xx GPU.)

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 18:35 UTC (Wed) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link] (2 responses)

They're not integrated as such, meaning integrated on the same chip as north bridge. Though I'm not sure what was meant in this case.

Newer integrated ATI graphics include Xpress200 (RS480/RS482) that has X300-derived graphics (RV3xx series) and Xpress 1250 (RS690) that has X700-derived graphics (RV4xx series). "V" is for eg. value and means it's R300/R400 series with a refined manufacturing process and cheaper / more mainstream parts.

There's currently no R500 series integrated graphics, even though RS690's graphics are touted to be "X1200" (and X1000-series is generally thought to be R500-derived, though it's not completely).

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 19:02 UTC (Wed) by AWJ (guest, #47173) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah, by "integrated" I meant GPUs built into a northbridge without any dedicated video RAM. Mobility Radeons are functionally discrete cards, they're just clocked slower and have more aggressive power-management capabilities than desktop cards.

Both ATI and Nvidia have been guilty at various times of breaking the "first digit indicates the GPU family" rule, though ATI has done it more often. ATI currently sells a discrete card called "X1050" that's R300-based--it's effectively a rebadged X300. Radeon 9n00:n <= 2 were rebadged R200-family cards, not R300-family cards as the model number implied. And who can forget the "GeForce 4 MX" cards which (as far as 3d capabilities went) were rebadged GF2's, quite unrelated to the real GeForce 4.

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 6, 2007 0:26 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

It's going to take a long time to get good 3D drivers.

It's going to cost AMD money and time to release specs for their hardware. Remember that they have other people's IP in there, probably including some of Microsoft's hardware experience.

They'd probably like developers to focus on newer stuff. Stuff that people are going to be using by the time these drivers are ready to go mainstream.

Things to do today

Posted Sep 6, 2007 3:39 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (3 responses)

1. Put AMD back on the shopping list

;-)

Things to do today

Posted Sep 6, 2007 5:28 UTC (Thu) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link] (2 responses)

Absolutely. I have been looking forward to my next big box next year -- probably a quad core Intel, hindered by a GMA X3000 or something graphics.

Now, assuming AMD follows through, it will likely be a quad-core Athlon64 with a high end ATI card.

I hope AMD folks are reading this. Way to go! :-)

Things to do today

Posted Sep 6, 2007 8:56 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

Lets hope the specifications include ATI-based motherboards.

The only peice of hardware more poorly supported then ATI graphics cards are ATI (and nvidia) motherboards. Intel still has a massive leg up on AMD in this department (which is sad because AMD-based boards have had excellent AMD to Linux support backing them up)

Even if the graphical stuff gets fixed then those motherboards are still going to be a huge weak link in AMD's hardware line-up.

Of course that leaves running AMD video cards on Intel hardware, which should still be very nice.

If AMD opens up the ATI motherboard chipsets also then probably what will happen is that AMD stuff will be ideal for high performance desktops and workstations while Intel stuff would be ideal for mobile devices.
(speaking in terms of desktop Linux)

Things to do today

Posted Sep 7, 2007 22:04 UTC (Fri) by AWJ (guest, #47173) [Link]

Err, what isn't supported, exactly? Now that AGP is dead and buried, there isn't really much left in a chipset that needs specific driver support. SATA and onboard audio are standardized now (AHCI and Intel HDA respectively)