ATI Open sourced Linux Drivers for 7900 series!

[PulsedMedia]

See: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA3NDE
Also reported on Slashdot http://linux.slashdot.org/story/12/03/21/030244/amd-releases-open-source-radeon-hd-7000-driver

[1715382537]

1715382537

[bulanula]

So are you telling me that this means the following things :

-no more hardcoded 8 GPU limit
-no need to have xserver active while mining

If this is true and allows you to get 715 MHash/s using 7970 then this is gold. Even better than Nvidia

Can this also be used for 5xxx series

Thanks !

[PulsedMedia]

All of the above: Don't know, improbable. Performance likely.

What it DOES mean is that we can now hack the drivers ourselves to maximize performance for mining

[jake262144]

Perhaps they finally realized what a poor job they have been doing with the driver code...
Ummm... anyone... here's the source code, take it and fix it for us please 

[chiropteran]

Perhaps they finally realized what a poor job they have been doing with the driver code...
Ummm... anyone... here's the source code, take it and fix it for us please  

Not really.  The drivers for the 5 and 6 series have been open sourced/published for a long time now.  AFAIK nobody uses the open source drivers for anything.  While it's nice that they exist, the open source drivers are lagging behind AMD's drivers by an order of magnitude.  So yeah, the "poor job" AMD does is still about 5X more effective than the open source drivers.

Maybe writing drivers isn't as easy as the average geek on a message board seems to think, and the open source community actually isn't better at it than the paid team at AMD...

[PulsedMedia]

Not really.  The drivers for the 5 and 6 series have been open sourced/published for a long time now.  AFAIK nobody uses the open source drivers for anything.  While it's nice that they exist, the open source drivers are lagging behind AMD's drivers by an order of magnitude.  So yeah, the "poor job" AMD does is still about 5X more effective than the open source drivers.

Maybe writing drivers isn't as easy as the average geek on a message board seems to think, and the open source community actually isn't better at it than the paid team at AMD...

The open source drivers of past were made by open source community NOT by AMD. This is AMD releasing drivers for Linux, otherwise it wouldn't even be newsworthy.

EDIT: Actually it might be this was not really newsworthy, but AMD making some updates to the open source drivers which has existed. The article is not very clear on this ...

[bulanula]

Not really.  The drivers for the 5 and 6 series have been open sourced/published for a long time now.  AFAIK nobody uses the open source drivers for anything.  While it's nice that they exist, the open source drivers are lagging behind AMD's drivers by an order of magnitude.  So yeah, the "poor job" AMD does is still about 5X more effective than the open source drivers.

Maybe writing drivers isn't as easy as the average geek on a message board seems to think, and the open source community actually isn't better at it than the paid team at AMD...

The open source drivers of past were made by open source community NOT by AMD. This is AMD releasing drivers for Linux, otherwise it wouldn't even be newsworthy.

EDIT: Actually it might be this was not really newsworthy, but AMD making some updates to the open source drivers which has existed. The article is not very clear on this ...

So then this is not actually significant at all ?

Still no compute support on opensource drivers then as I understand it ...

[DeathAndTaxes]

That is correct. 

[DiabloD3]

See: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA3NDE
Also reported on Slashdot http://linux.slashdot.org/story/12/03/21/030244/amd-releases-open-source-radeon-hd-7000-driver

This not the news that people think it is. AMD has spent about $2 million on Mesa, Gallium, and the Radeon FOSS driver, including having 2 full time employees working exclusively on FOSS.

Yes, this makes AMD the best fucking company ever, but Mesa/Gallium still does not have an OpenCL solution that I can drop a miner on and get at least 90% of the performance I do with fglrx (although, give it a year or two, I'll get what I want rsn).

[rjk]

(although, give it a year or two, I'll get what I want rsn).

By that time GPUs will be the new CPUs and nobody will give a flying fuck.