Showing posts with label device drivers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label device drivers. Show all posts

AMD / ATI release Linux drivers for their popular graphics cards

October 29, 2007 Posted by Ravi 0 comments
It is a common perception among Free software enthusiasts that AMD's acquisition of ATI bodes really good for Linux and Free software. This perception is bang on target because AMD has promised that it will be eventually providing open source drivers for all its graphics cards. Just yet, AMD/ATI has released Linux drivers for its popular range of graphics cards namely ATI Catalyst 7.10 graphics drivers.

So what is so unique about the ATI Catalyst ? Well, ATI Catalyst is a unified software suite which delivers a full software solution for supported Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems. And AMD/ATI claims that all ATI products use the same Catalyst driver ensuring all products take advantage of the incredible performance, stability, innovative features, and visual quality that the Catalyst software suite have to offer. The latest version of ATI Catalyst is 7.10. It has support for AIGLX and ATI GPUs which translates to enhanced performance in playing 3D games such as Quake and Doom.

Fig: ATI Catalyst driver architecture

If you own a ATI graphics card, you may download the driver suite for Linux from AMD's official website. Of course, this driver has not yet been released as open source and is as proprietary as the Nvidia drivers. But with AMD in charge, one can say with certainty that ATI has become a lot more Linux friendly than it was before its acquisition.
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A Device Driver Development Kit for Linux

May 28, 2006 Posted by Anonymous 2 comments
A driver development kit provides a build environment, tools, driver samples, and documentation to support driver development for a particular operating system. Linux had always lacked a proper driver development kit. And anybody who intended to write a device driver had to do with sifting through tons of documentation and example source code that other operating systems provide for their developers.

Greg KH has posted at LKML (Linux Kernel Mailing List) that a device driver kit has indeed been released for Linux which contain everything that a Linux driver author would need to create Linux drivers. Additionally, it also contain a copy of the O'Reilly book "Linux Device Drivers". The device driver kit for Linux can be freely downloaded as an ISO image here (92 MB).
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