Any plans to upgrade radeonhd to 1.2.5 (DRI enabled) for Fedora 11?

[Dave Airlie]

On Sun, 2009-04-12 at 22:06 -0600, Nathanael Noblet wrote:
> On Apr 12, 2009, at 7:38 PM, Dave Airlie wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, 2009-04-11 at 20:52 -0700, Otto Rey wrote:
> >> I know that maybe it's to late, but: any plans to upgrade radeonhd  
> >> to 1.2.5 (latest upstream release, DRI enabled) for Fedora 11?
> >>
> >
> > I'd prefer people didn't run radeonhd if at all possible, unless you
> > need HDMI audio there is no reason to run it, and you are diluting the
> > testing base for Fedora by not running the shipping radeon driver.
> >
> 
> Really? Why? I thought the radeonhd was to replace radeon eventually?  
> Built off the released specs from AMD/ATI, whereas the radeon driver  
> was a reverse engineered driver without docs? Am I on crack? After  
> seeing this and thinking I was using radeonhd I looked at my x log  
> messages which show RADEON(x), so I guess I'm using that now anyway,  
> but a bit confused...
> 

No radeon supports all radeons ever. Radeon was originally a document
written driver, in fact most of radeon was written with docs from ATI or
patches from ATI. Most of the reverse engineering was in the 3D driver
in Mesa not so much in the 2D X.org driver.

RadeonHD was a clean driver for r500 and above however the developers
took what the radeon driver maintainers (i.e. me and an AMD employee)
believed to be an unsupportable direction in terms of ignoring the ATI
bios bytecode for setting up the hardware. So radeon just added support
for the bytecode interpreter and worked on lots of hardware. RadeonHD
has since switched to using this interpreter on nearly all hardware, but
at that point it was too late to rescue it. Novell/AMD attempted to prop
up radeonhd for political reasons, but it seems to be losing the battle
now.

So radeonhd is going nowhere new, radeon is the only driver that
supports the new kernel modesetting systems. With kernel modesetting the
X.org 2D driver doesn't do very much anymore, and everything that is
left for it to do is shared code between the two drivers.

Dave.