Drawing Open-Source Triangles On The ATI RV770

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On Monday AMD released theopen-source R600/700 3D codeto begin fostering the development of an open-source 3D driver for their newer ATI hardware while the related programming documentation still on the way. This code that's finally out in the public domain brings basicEXA accelerationandX-Videosupport, but on the 3D side there isn't any usable OpenGL support. It is expected that there will be a modest level of open-source 3D support for the ATI R600 and R700 series in the first half of 2008 for end-users, but for now there is just the DRM code and an r600_demo program. In this article we are taking a brief look at this r600_demo debugging utility on theRV770 hardware.

The r600_demo program is described as a "DRM/DRI exercise utility" designed for hardware driver hackers. This utility was originally derived from the earlier r300_demo code, but since then this code has been virtually rewritten in its entirety. Among the capabilities of r600_demo is dumping the GPU and DRM states, command processor setup testing, more extensive command processor tests, triangle testing, texture tests, and GPU reset ability. This open-source code also supports dumping all known GPU registers as well as manually setting register values for testing. The r600_demo can also provide direct ring programming capabilities. Over 18,000 lines of code make up this program.

While r600_demo is not intended for end-users, if you are an enthusiast or developer interested in trying out this experimental code it can be found in the r600_demo Git repository atFreeDesktop.org. Running r600_demo requires a relatively recent version of the

href="http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=xf86-video-radeonhd">xf86-video-radeonhd driver

and the latest DRM code (currently found in ther6xx-r7xx-supportbranch ofmesa/drm). In order to use r600_demo, DRI must be enabled and any form of 2D acceleration be disabled from thexorg.conf. As the r600_demo code feeds commands to the hardware through the DRM and doesn't use OpenGL or anything else interpretive, there is no need for Mesa or any other dependencies. The r600_demo utility is programmed to work just on the R600 and R700 series. We had run the latest development code for the RadeonHD driver, R600/700 DRM, and r600_demo on an Ubuntu 8.10 installation with aATI Radeon HD 4870.

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We have triangles! Albeit not anything fancy like glxgears, there's just two triangles to show in the corner of the display.

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