News on ATI driver
Hello. Finally I do have some good news for all of you who are interested in using their ATI cards with AROS. The ATI driver works properly now, however it is still unaccelerated. That means, that at this time it is even slower than the legacy Vesa driver. But finally it works.
The code looks pretty ugly now - it is a mixture of AROS typical code and the XFree86 code (modified BSD licence). Since there are many workarounds needed and the chip initialisation is not trivial, I have just reused the XFree86 code here. Since there are some differences between AROS and XFree86 (in AROS, all bitmaps are stored in VRAM if available, and blits between them are done by 2D accel engine of the card), the rest of the code will be much more cleaner and logical. The driver cannot detect type of connected monitors at the moment and it assumes that they all are CRT's. It does work with my TFT connected through analog DB15. In order to change that, we need i2c bus implementation and support for ddc/ddc2.
I will commit the source into AROS as soon as I clean the code up (it's matter of two days in the worst case) and binary driver will show up somewhere here, including instructions how to use it with already installed AROS.
Stay tuned :-)
The code looks pretty ugly now - it is a mixture of AROS typical code and the XFree86 code (modified BSD licence). Since there are many workarounds needed and the chip initialisation is not trivial, I have just reused the XFree86 code here. Since there are some differences between AROS and XFree86 (in AROS, all bitmaps are stored in VRAM if available, and blits between them are done by 2D accel engine of the card), the rest of the code will be much more cleaner and logical. The driver cannot detect type of connected monitors at the moment and it assumes that they all are CRT's. It does work with my TFT connected through analog DB15. In order to change that, we need i2c bus implementation and support for ddc/ddc2.
I will commit the source into AROS as soon as I clean the code up (it's matter of two days in the worst case) and binary driver will show up somewhere here, including instructions how to use it with already installed AROS.
Stay tuned :-)
posted by Michal Schulz at 09:05
3 Comments:
Excellent news, Michal!!!
I was wondering if you could sum up some of the specs on your ATI driver.
Will it support hardware overlays? Also is Aros loading drivers, or is it grub that does that?
I congratulate you for your incredible productivity!!!
Tor/Norway
> I was wondering if you could sum
> up some of the specs on your ATI
> driver.
Right now it is hard to guess. It will support a bunch of ATI hardware (starting from Radeon series, R128 chips are way different and need separate driver), where the list of supported ID's is to long to post it here :)
The driver will utilise whole memory of the video card. That is, the bitmaps will be stored in VRAM whereas possible. Therefore drawing on the offscreen bitmaps might be done using the accel engine of radeons. The rest is still unspecified.
> Will it support hardware
> overlays?
I doubt it right now. Hardware overlays are pretty simple, the only problem is that our gfx hidd subsystem knows nothing about overlays. Once it's fixed, I will add overlay support for this driver and for nvidia driver.
> Also is Aros loading drivers, or
> is it grub that does that?
Through a kernel parameter which you may specify in GRUB, you tell AROS which driver to load. But loading of the driver is handled completely by AROS itself.
can you add support for the X1300...
VendID 0x1002 ProdID 0x7146
And The Radeon Ati Xpress 200
VendID 0x1002 ProdID 0x5955
will gladly test for you.
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