If AMD will open specs in a way sufficient for developing a new driver (and start of the
development by providing a reference driver, this is indeed very good news. Some sources
even say that a first version of the new, free driver they’re promising will be released
next week. I’ll happily download the source code once I’m back from vacation. :-)
it looks like it’s all a grand masterplan, and one that works well with the Free Software
development model as well. Rumours are that the people (among which Dave Airlie who has
shown in the past that he is dedicated to getting this high priority item in the Free
world fixed.) who have earlier been working on reverse engineering existing drivers.
Phoronix (an ATI friendly website) is of course all raged about all this news. At the same time, the closed fglrx driver seems to be recovering from a long period of
minimal feature additions. For now, ATI promises large performance improvements for the
imminent 8.41 release and AIGLX support for October. This hopefully means short term that
a lot more machines that will run KDE 4 will be able to use a composited environment. Longer
term it means that the out of the box experience will be much better (imagine the driver
being merged in main line Linux and BSD!). Also it means that *you* decide when to throw
away that old video card (not a vendor deciding when to stop supporting it for newer kernels)
and maybe even the long-awaited stable support for suspend/resume. ATI now following Intel’s way of working with the community rather than around it means
that NVidia will have to think how to rearrange its “Open Source strategy” so it fits better
with a community-driven development model — although the immediate pressure on them is
a bit lower due to better driver quality and shorter ‘time-to-user’. “Following” in this
context means that that ATI requires — just like Intel — some sort of NDA for those who
want to look into the specifications. An interesting bit is that the often-cited ‘AMD representative’ at the Kernel Summit in
Cambridge is Chris Schlaeger, a long-time KDE developer. Congrats, Chris!
Update: It seems that AMD has released large parts of their specification without
strings attached. Kudos to those who made it happen!