The open source ATI 6.8.0 driver was released yesterday, after a long time in the making. Some of the major improvements include Radeon support for r5xx, rs6xx and r6xx chips, using ATOMBIOS, the porting of mach64, r128 and radeon to libpciaccess and improved BIOS/driver interaction on Radeon.

Here are some of the changes included in this release:

￭ massive restructuring of ati wrapper
￭ return of zaphod mode support
￭ PAL tv-out fixed on supported chips
￭ initial support for render accel on r3xx/r4xx chips (rotation)
￭ fix TV option handling
￭ Xv RGB fixes
￭ XPRESS Xv fixes
￭ revert back to previous AGP mode behavior
￭ Initial integration of Atom code.
￭ Initial support for r4xx
￭ WIP: get ATOM crtc stuff working on r4xx
￭ for r4xx ATOM cards, just use ATOM for PLL
￭ Add atombios files
￭ First round of avivo support
￭ add additional connector types
￭ more avivo updates
￭ add avivo output stuff
￭ add support for initing external tmds via ATOM

This new version of the xf86-video-ati driver came up after three months of work. The previous version, 6.7.197, had brought us better notebook lid detection through Linux ACPI, fixed EXA transforms, better rn50 mode handling, cursor rotation problems repaired, and a big number of bugfixes. I am glad that the developers didn't hurry things up, and worked on it to bring so many changes and new features. I know that bugs might be found in it, but the open source ATI 6.8.0 driver is the best of its series until now. That's why I advise everyone with an ATI card to download it - if you are a developer, you might look under its hood, and tinker around with it - and use it as default driver. You can have the ATI 6.8.0 open source driver, also known as xf86-video-ati, by downloading it from Softpedia. Download it right now from Softpedia!