support for latest (radeon) hardware (was: Re: Xorg plans for F10?)

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 13:20:09 +0100,
  Thorsten Leemhuis <fedora at leemhuis.info> wrote:
>
> I compared radeon.xinf from 6.9 and 6.10 and found a few important cards  
> that 6.10 supports, but 6.9 does not:

> * configure xorg-x11-drv-radeonhd to get their hardware running
> * switch to rawhide to get it running
> * rebuild the srpm from rawhide to get it running.
> * switch to another distro that has more up2date drivers
> * wait till F11 comes out
>
> But those options are all bad IMHO. Especially the option "wait till F11  
> comes out", because letting users out in the cold without drivers for up  
> multiple month sounds stupid to me when those drivers exist already --  
> especially as new graphic card series come out every 6 to 12 months,  
> which means we'll run into the same problem quite soon again.

The current 6.10 driver in rawhide does not work with my rv280 based card.
The Xorg.0.log file suggests that it is a problem with AGP support.
The drivers in F11 are tied to the kernels there more than in the past
because of modesetting support, so there is likely more work in getting
6.10 to work in F10 than there would have been doing something similar
in the past.

There is a lot going on right now in the driver world, so expect things to
be slow for a while. ATI released a bunch of specs. Kernel modesetting is
being turned on. Having the kernel manage the video memory is being turned
on (and changed at the same time for ATI chips). And Dave Airlie has a
new born.

In the future expect a new series of ATI chips to be a lot easier to get
support for.