Matthias Hopf, one of the developers of the open-source ATI R500/600+ driver, achieved to get various demos and even UNREAL TOURNAMENT 2004 running flawlessly under his new DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) on an RS690 GPU and he has published RadeonHD DRM code into his personal development tree.

More info + details:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ati_r500_3d&num=1

Now it is possible to port those drivers to OS4, it is just a matter of interest from some OS4 dev.

Mr. Friedens, what can you tell us?

Last edited by DaveyD on 09-Aug-2008 at 05:47 PM.

@vision

Don't shout (refering to topic).

in case you have missed, Olegil had Ati Radeon X300 running on his Amigaone several years ago

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@vision

We have tech docs from AMD for R600. No need for the open-source, just need time and motivation to add support to existing OS4 Radeon driver, which you need either way.

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@vision

Not so fast. I've got a Radeon X1300 in my A1 and I've already had a look at the RadeonHD code. It's heavily laced with xf86 calls (X-windows). Also, the RadeonHD driver won't run on PowerPC machines because of endianness issues, at least back when I looked at the code. The biggest task would actually be getting the 2D driver working.

All I can say is have patience, a lot of patience. Oh, and anyone that has one of these cards and wants to work on drivers for this card, PM me please.

Hans

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https://keasigmadelta.com/ - More of my work.

@billt

Quote:

billt wrote: @vision We have tech docs from AMD for R600. No need for the open-source, just need time and motivation to add support to existing OS4 Radeon driver, which you need either way.

True, but this code is pretty clean. Also, the AtomBIOS isn't documented, but the source-code for the interpreter is provided. I've been playing with the code a bit, and I think that it would be useful.

Hans

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https://keasigmadelta.com/ - More of my work.

@tomazkid

Not 3D accelerated

Of course I know about the open source graphic drivers, but you missed the point: They achieved now full 3D acceleration in the latest chip generation.

@ billt

MOTIVATION. That's the biggest shame of the current Amiga situation. When I think that even small and simple devices (such as a GP2X or a psp) have a JAVA port... How pathetic is our community.

@vision

Quote:

MOTIVATION. That's the biggest shame of the current Amiga situation. When I think that even small and simple devices (such as a GP2X or a psp) have a JAVA port... How pathetic is our community.

I was pretty into stuff for a long while. Then I decided to try and bring my desire for a laptop to reality. All that BS from Amiga Inc. about locensing OS4 and their absolute lack of response when people like me tried to do what they told us to really ####ed me off. Those guys are the worse thing to happen to Amiga, and me saying that probably does a lot to ruin my chances of getting anywhere after the lawsuit is sorted out, but with them involved I don't see anything going anywhere. I'm hoping Hyperion win the lawsuit, or tha they can work out some suitable deal. Otherwise all is lost IMNSHO, and I have less than zero faith in Amiga Inc. I appreciate those who can keep going, but Amiga Inc. has seriously demotivated me from doing anything related to "their" products. I want to, and I still make PC purchasing decisions with this intent in mind (specifically buying a laptop with the particular R600 chip my docs concentrate on and which I have a desktop card for as well to peek at registers, and getting as many features as I'd want to be able to support on OS4 such as HDMI/DVI trumping the battery life I'd really benefit more from) But with everything else going on in my life, this just doesn't get much if any priority these days. I'd still love to make a laptop, or arrange OS4 porting to an iBook. Via just announced some open subnotebook platform with available CAD files, which sounds interesting. I've already chosen a PC laptop host for my own project, and planned out a path to put a PowerPC into it. The Apple/PA Semi thing is a huge monkeywrench in what I wanted to do, but I'm still working on the whole thought experiment what else to use. But until the lawsuit is resolves, hopefully in Amiga the platform's favor (I don't think Amiga the company's favor is in the platform's favor at all), I just can't get myself to spend any real time doing any real work.

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Quote:

billt wrote: @vision Quote: Those guys are the worse thing to happen to Amiga

right on... amiga is 100% screwed under the management of bill mcewen.

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@vision

Quote:

vision wrote: MOTIVATION. That's the biggest shame of the current Amiga situation. When I think that even small and simple devices (such as a GP2X or a psp) have a JAVA port... How pathetic is our community.

Making something happens requires being more pro-active about it. How much interest is there in having more modern graphics cards? Judging by this thread, not much. That's not going to improve motivation by much is it?

Hans

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https://keasigmadelta.com/ - More of my work.

@billt

I agree with you practically in each and every one of your points. Just take care of focusing you efforts in an absolute right direction, because 8 years ago I was in a somewhat similar situation of yours:

I though creating a new version of a 1200 would a good selling solution, so prepared a prototype with: CD, Buffered IDE, HD, SCSI, USB, PPC at 300 and Bvision all integrated in the original case, with new colours (mine was in metal-blue), and I offered it to Amiga inc. By the way, the answer I got from Fleecy was: good idea, we have no money! So in the end, just me enjoyed it.

You can take a look at it here: http://www.thecryptmag.com/Online/21/main.html

@Hans

I never though it would be an easy task. Not at all. But the good point is having your attitude: try it! even it seems hard. What matters is the objective, not the walls you have to jump to achieve it.

Very probably you know this:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver


but can it help?

Last edited by vision on 28-May-2008 at 06:25 PM.
Last edited by vision on 28-May-2008 at 06:19 PM.

@vision

Quote:

By the way, the answer I got from Fleecy was: good idea, we have no money! So in the end, just me enjoyed it.

You got an answer?! Wow. They must have really liked you. They never even acknowledged my contact attempts. Not even the supposed questionairre that McEwen claims that all inquirers received.

Anyway. back to the actual thread topic... The only real use that the open-source drivers would be is if there was a P96/MiniGL wrapper to it. That might be interesting, and potentially allow more graphics drivers to come to Amiga, but it's outside the license from the P96 guys that I've seen and thus not allowed. And while I'd like to see more stuff usable with OS4, I don't want it to effectively become a hackish Linux distro. If all we want is to use Linux code, then we should just use Linux and save a lot of hassle. If we're wanting OS4, then we want something other than Linux and thus Linux code.

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@billt

Quote:

billt wrote: Anyway. back to the actual thread topic... The only real use that the open-source drivers would be is if there was a P96/MiniGL wrapper to it. That might be interesting, and potentially allow more graphics drivers to come to Amiga, but it's outside the license from the P96 guys that I've seen and thus not allowed. And while I'd like to see more stuff usable with OS4, I don't want it to effectively become a hackish Linux distro. If all we want is to use Linux code, then we should just use Linux and save a lot of hassle. If we're wanting OS4, then we want something other than Linux and thus Linux code.

The RadeonHD driver license is very liberal. You can use it in closed-source projects without a problem. I wouldn't just create a wrapper for P96/MiniGL but simply snip out code and insert it into a proper driver. Most of the initialization stuff is the same regardless of the API being used. However, P96 and MiniGL are both going to be replaced, so it would make more sense to target whatever new API is used.

Hans

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https://keasigmadelta.com/ - More of my work.

@Hans

It wasn't just that easy to copy/paste code for the existing ATIRadeon driver in OS4 from the example source code before, I wouldn't expect that to have magically changed somehow for this one. For OS4 Classic, you need to do a lot of chip initialization that PCs do at POST and does not appear at all in Linux drivers, as one example. We did our original driver development on A3000 with Prometheus on OS3.x... And not all Radeon cards could be inited properly by uboot's x86 emulation either, I just gave my AIW8500DV card away because it was not compatible and I never bothered to use it elsewhere, and the Radeon BIOS parser was never added to uboot, I don't think our NDA with ATI would have allowed it.

I myself would do a wrapper if anything at all from that open-source stuff, so that you could benefit from other open-source drivers for other chips as well. If I'm making an AmigaOS driver, for whatever AmigaOS API, I'd rather start with the documentation, and look at example code as a supplement. Just IMHO.

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@billt

Sure there will be extra things to do, but post initialization, setting screen resolutions etc. will involve writing the same values to the same registers.

Whether you use the source-code or rely mostly on the documentation, it really is just a matter of time and effort.

Hans

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https://keasigmadelta.com/ - More of my work.

@Hans

And you are certainly looking at better code than was available to me at the time. Little to zero comments (I like to understand WHY code is doing stuff, not just what it is doing, especially when it's all just meaningless hardcoded values to/from meaningless hardcoded addresses), our example stuff was just example snippets not even a complete driver, absolutely zero in the way of POST configuring the chip on our dev systems... We didn't get away from the docs very often for what we went through as the code we were given really wasn't very helpful, and that opinion is still with me for whatever reason, and I haven't seen any other code like this since early X11 drivers that I found completely unreadable and the cheesy stuff ATI gave us since then. At the time, ATI really wasn't into making good documentation or code for 3rd party use, and they didn't even like hearing from us when we found mistakes in their stuff that might benefit themselves or other 3rd parties. I am happy to see they are more forthcoming these days.

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@billt

We can thank AMD for buying up ATI. It's AMD's more open philosophy that made this happen.

Hans

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https://keasigmadelta.com/ - More of my work.

Here they got something working on ps3, so endianess issues shouldn't be present:
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/

Regards,
Richi

@Richi

Quote:

Richi wrote: Here they got something working on ps3, so endianess issues shouldn't be present: http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/ Regards, Richi

Nouveau is an nvidia driver and has nothing to do with the RadeonHD driver.

Hans

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https://keasigmadelta.com/ - More of my work.

@Hans

Quote:

Making something happens requires being more pro-active about it. How much interest is there in having more modern graphics cards? Judging by this thread, not much. That's not going to improve motivation by much is it?

I went shopping for a more up to date card and found them to be way more expensive than the new ones. so bring on the drivers. I am only sorry that is the only thing I can do to motivate at the moment. If there is a fund I will contribute.
Best,
John Paul

@Hans

Yes I know.
Anyway, it could be interesting to get the support for modern graphic card.