14 DAY TRIAL // The RadeonHD driver has been released yesterday and it's being hosted on FreeDesktop.org. This new driver is the result of AMD's cooperation with Novell, supporting the Radeon HD 2000 (R600) group. Although it has a lot of improvements, there's still much work to be done.
The RadeonHD driver is mainly written by the Novell/SuSE team, and soon, AMD will release more documentation once the documents are checked by their legal department. Right now, the driver can't do too much stuff, being targeted only for developers and those who want to experiment if the driver works. If the documentation promised by AMD will be available soon, reverse engineering for the R500 and R600 series won't be needed.
Until a complete and stable version for 2D graphics is released, some months will pass, and after some time, the 3D will be available, but this could change depending on the number of persons from the X.Org community who will get involved in the project.
AMD has some great plans to expand its Linux assistance, using Catalyst 7.9, which will add support for Radeon HD 2000 and improves performance with approximately 90% in a number of games.
This could mean that the Linux gaming industry will soon grow, because right now, it's still underdeveloped and the community of Linux gamers is almost inexistent.
The developers are very enthusiastic about AMD's decision, and some consider AMD is making great efforts to help the Open Source community and are waiting for the complete and verified documentation with more source code for the 2D skeleton driver, Avivo library etc. This open source driver is considered a good rival for NVIDIA's proprietary drivers. This could lead to other graphics cards producers creating open source drivers and documentation for their video cards, a very important step in the betterment of the Linux distributions.