Re: [gNewSense-users] ATI blobs

[Dmitry Samoyloff]

Jason Self wrote:
> > I just picked a 1080p video from my computer and started playing it.
> > Then I clicked the top of the window & moved my mouse around all over
> > the screen, dragging the window along with it. Playback remained
> > smooth & didn't drop a frame. I wonder what is causing such a large
> > difference between our experiences, beyond the physical cards.

I have to investigate on this, maybe it's my bad :-/

> Another thought I had concerns this:
> 
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_r600_oss_3d&num=1
> 
> AMD releasing documentation surely has to be a good thing, no? I mean,
> it can't be hurting.
> With the stuff that AMD keeps releasing publically, having access to
> low level information like this, it seems that people will eventually
> get 3D acceleration into a free software driver eventually no?

There *is* 3D acceleration already for R600, even with OpenGL-2.0 support. The 
problem is that people tend to ignore the fact that the free driver depends on 
some non-free code. If everybody will ignore the problem, it will never be 
gone. Lately, I'm trying to find out more on this problem but it seems to me 
that nobody care at all: everyone who need some 3D are just happy with new 
free driver relying on the blobbed DRM module from Linux :-(

I found this post in the thread started by RMS:
http://www.mail-archive.com/address@hidden/msg00404.html
However I don't know how much obsolete this information is to date.

Another link is
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_atombios_dumper&num=1
AMD released free tools to disassemble their AtomBIOS, but I don't know how 
much it is related to those blobs in Linux. Are they AtomBIOS itself? What is 
the license of disassembled code?

Personally, I see no point in the free driver which is in fact a front-end to 
a blob. I maybe getting this wrong -- comments are welcome.

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