Re: [RFC] Small PCI core patch

Jon Smirl
2005-11-22T16:54:13Z

On 11/21/05, Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org> wrote:
> For those who haven't noticed, the latest generation of ATI cards have a
> new 2D engine that is completely different from the previous one and
> totally undocumented. So far, they haven't showed any plans to provide
> any kind of documentation for it, unlike what they did for previous
> chipsets, not even 2D and not even under NDA. That means absolutely _0_
> support for it in linux or X.org except maybe with some future version
> of their binary blob, and _0_ support for it for any non-x86
> architecture of course.

Are you sure it is a new 2D engine? ATI engineers have mentioned
several times that they were looking at removing the 2D engine and
going 3D only - using the 3D engine to draw the 2D data.

Removal of the 2D engines is a key vulnerability in the strategy of
only using 2D on Linux.

--
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl@gmail.com