Most of the recent Linux, Solaris and BSD distributions include open source driver support for all of the GPUs which were in production before each distro release locked down. In some cases newer driver packages are available from the distro packagers; if not, you may need to build the drivers from publicly available source code.
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This page was created Aug 5/09, renamed to "atidrivers" Feb 12/10
Status
- R100/R200 (Radeon 7000 – Radeon 9250) and R300/R400/R500 (Radeon 9500 – Radeon X1950) class chips:
- 2D: accelerated (EXA), stable
XVideo: accelerated and tear free, stable
- 3D: accelerated, stable
- kernel driver is maintained in Linux kernel tree and ported to Solaris and BSD
- R600/R700 class chips (Radeon HD 2300 – Radeon HD 4890):
- 2D: accelerated (EXA), stable
XVideo: accelerated and tear free, stable
3D: development at mesa master (r600 mesa driver)
needs 2.6.32 or higher kernel for Linux (? what are corresponding versions for Solaris & BSD ?)
More 3D information at DRI wiki: ATIRadeon. See also RadeonFeature and RadeonProgram for feature and supported program lists. And R300 Portal for some older stuff.
Documentation and Support
A number of programming guides and register specs are available at http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/ and mirrored in the Open GPU Documentation section of http://www.amd.com.
Downloading and building source code
Please see the pages for each of the individual drivers. If you are building the drm driver as well as other drivers, the drm driver should be built and installed first.