AMD just announced that its upcoming Catalyst 7.9 drivers for Linux will not only finally provide support to HD 2000 series on the OS, but it is also claimed to host the most significant series of enhancements ever for Linux users. As far as AMD graphics drivers are concerned, that is.

AMD announced on Sept 7 a major strategic change in open-source graphic processors support. It announced it would provide open-source information and a development package supporting the ATI RadeonHD 2000 series ATI Radeon X1000 series of graphics processing units on Linux desktops.

Jerome Glisse announced today that a small team of X.Org developers has managed to provide the initial support for ATI R500-based cards (ATI Radeon X1300 up to X1600 at the time) by reverse engineering. The released code is definitely not yet ready for the normal users, but it's the big step ahead nevertheless.

Novell has released version 1.0.0 of their free Radeon r5xx/r6xx AMD/ATI drivers. This is their first full release of these drivers. There is currently no 2D or 3D acceleration.

This represents the first fully-free driver based on the recently-released Radeon hardware specifications.

Reverse-engineering open source drivers for hardware devices will only reduce the pressure on manufacturers to provide such drivers, Dirk Hohndel told an audience at the Australian national Linux conference today.

The open-source Avivo driver is currently bound to supporting the ATI R500 GPU family and with efforts now being focused on the RadeonHD driver, this reverse-engineered driver will likely never support the newer GPUs (The Death Of The R500 Avivo Driver). However, the RadeonHD driver that was pushed out into the public a few hours ago does support the R600 series.

Brother is now developing drivers which are designed to work on Linux distributions, Redhat, Mandriva(Mandrake), SuSE, Debian and FedoraCore. We have developed two types of driver: LPR drivers and CUPS drivers.

Last week, AMD released register specifications for the RV630 and M56 parts into open source, thus allowing the OSS community to develop 2D (and theoretically 3D) drivers, given time. Current documentation for the project is available over at X.Org.

Linux developers demand open drivers, docs and development processes, NVIDIA refuses to open their drivers, arguing that the technical quality is not a problem, and that the driver contains intellectual property they wish to protect. ATI/AMD has shown the intellectual property argument is at least not universally applicable to graphics hardware. Let's also clear up a misconception about the technical quality of closed NVIDIA drivers.