October 13, 2005

64-bit world. Waiting for hardware.

Well, few days ago I've applied for the x86-64 bounty. Hopefully the Epox mainboard together will nice athlon chip will arrive within the next two weeks. I have to grab all components I need by this time.

Getting 64-bit native into work may be a bit complex but at the very moment I see no reason for it to be undoable. There will be many many fixes to aros required. Some pieces of code will have to be made APTR/IPTR aware (we happen to use ULONG variables to store pointers somewhere in our code nowadays). But it should work.

No. It will work!

I guess I will try to implement some parts of my RFC number 01 there, in order to make kernel really modular. The local APIC of cpu will be used (all 64-bit AMD and Intel CPU's do have it anyway). It may also turn out, that I will have to apply for Bounty #32 just by the way :)

AROS can detect my ATI card now

There is a progress. The driver just finds my Radeon card and detects amount of it's GFX memory. Of course it still uses the nasty busy loop usleep microsecond delays, but I should turn it into using UNIT_MICROHZ of timer.device within this evening :)

No commit will occur since the driver is still highly unusable.

October 7, 2005

ATI bounty

I have taken the ATI Bounty recently. I hope that the deadline of this bounty will motivate me a little bit.

The work will be splitted into several stages, whereas upon completion of every stage a binary driver may be published and the source will be svn-synced with main AROS tree. I hope some of you will be then able to test it and report any issues met.

I have abandoned the idea of universal ATI driver for all cards from this vendor. Instead, the radeon class will be implemented as the first one :). The support for R128 and other ancient models will come a bit later.

It's time to create new project in my Eclipse IDE :)