cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Archives Discussions

noy
Journeyman III

Why doesn't amd release a BSD driver?

It is not as good as nvidia in that mean.

0 Likes
3 Replies
gsellers
Staff

Hi Noy,

It's something that has been considered, but honestly, we don't have the resources to support another family of operating systems. It's hard enough to keep up with all of the different Linux distributions and versions of Windows that we support now. We'd love for everyone to be able to use our GPUs in whatever system they're interested in using.

All I can suggest is that you check out our Open Source drivers here http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati. It's quite possible that they could be ported or used to bootstrap a community-driven effort on *BSD. Several AMD employees contribute to that project, we've opened a lot of documentation on our GPUs (http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/) and are here to help anyone who wants to work on this. If you'd like to participate, I can get you in touch with the maintainers.

Thanks,

Graham

0 Likes

Hi all, I am a FreeBSD user.

Well, I wanna know if now (2014) the problem to AMD maintain a driver for FreeBSD persists. What about this AMDGPU open source module + userland blob for Linux you are developing? This open source module could be ported by FreeBSD porter but the userland blob can't, could you maintain this blob and help to port the module for FreeBSD?

Thanks

0 Likes
bridgman
Staff

As Graham said, we are contributing actively to open source drivers whose code is written and licensed so that it can be ported easily to BSD or other OSes. In addition to the ddx driver Graham referenced, there is also kernel driver code in the Linux kernel tree, 3D driver code in the Mesa project ( http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa ) and kernel/user interface at http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/drm .

http://developer.amd.com/zones/opensource/Pages/default.aspx

There is a FreeBSD-funded project underway to port the recent open source graphics kernel driver for Intel GPUs across to BSD. After about a year of work it looks like that effort is nearing completion; it should also provide a good starting point for porting the radeon open source driver stack across since a good chunk of the BSD-specific code should be re-useable. 

0 Likes