RadeonHD Open-Source Linux Driver Released

AMD has finally provided the open-source community with GPU specifications and have been partnering with Novell on an open-source display driver. If you are a developer and are interested in chacking the code, it’s readily available. For the end-user with R600-based GPUs, you can download the driver and give it a go. Just don’t expect extreme performance, as it’s still very much a work in progress.

Don’t expect any miracles from this driver just yet. At this point, the RadeonHD driver is really targeted for developers and those wanting to use the experimental driver whether it is due to problems using the fglrx driver on the system or just wishing to test out the driver to see if it works for you. As long as AMD sticks to their word on delivering the rest of their documentation, there will not be too much (if any) reverse engineering that needs to take place for the R500 and R600 series.

Source: Phoronix