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[gNewSense-users] No 3D for ATI Video Cards


From: David Couzelis
Subject: [gNewSense-users] No 3D for ATI Video Cards
Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2009 08:00:09 -0800 (PST)

It seems that ATI video cards will not work in gNewSense at the moment, even 
with the recently freed GLX code. The reason is that the ATI drivers are not in 
gNewSense. Apparently, the free ATI drivers are not free. :-P

I think I'll stick with my RADEON X850 for now, even though I don't 
have 3D graphics, instead of buying a new motherboard to get Intel integrated 
3D graphics. In December 2008, AMD released the 3D code for their newest video 
cards, so maybe something will become of that soon.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_r600_oss_3d&num=1

Here is the detailed information I found. I will post it here so other people 
don't go crazy trying to figure out what's wrong, like I did. ;-)

Here is a thread from the gNewSense forums about the ATI drivers. Please see 
the post by kdean06.

http://wiki.gnewsense.org/ForumMain/ATIDrivers

He also made a similar comment on another message board.

http://www.nuxified.org/topic/gnewsense#comment-8794

Here are the bugs related to the non-free section of the ATI driver.

http://bugs.gnewsense.org/Bugs/00186
http://bugs.gnewsense.org/Bugs/00140

The offending file is "radeon_cp.c". Here is a copy of it. (it might 
be an older version)

https://svn.mcs.anl.gov/repos/ZeptoOS/tests/linux-2.6.19.2svn/drivers/char/drm/radeon_cp.c

As you can see, under the comment "CP microcode (from ATI)", there is 
a big blob of binary code that is used by the driver.

You can read about what the people at Debian think about it. It is specifically 
mentioned on this page.

http://wiki.debian.org/KernelFirmwareLicensing

I don't know if there is any work going on to replace the offending code. 
My guess would be no.

Dave


      




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