It was over a month ago since I last provided an update that I heard from the ATI R500 (X1000 series) reverse-engineering team for an open-source 2D and 3D driver (the first post). I have been waiting on hearing back from Daniel Stone or anyone else working on the R500 driver, but I haven't heard anything from them in a few weeks nor have I seen any new Wiki page. I'll post when I hear anything of significance.

I heard from David Airlie this morning and he imagines they are busy with their real-life matters for a while. David also mentioned he is working on debugging some 200M items right now for the open-source R300 driver. Speaking of ATI/AMD, Forbes has two financial articles out on AMD this afternoon -- Is AMD Giving Up? and AMD Likely To Cut Prices Further.

Later this week the R500 support in the binary fglrx driver turns one year old.

Probably efforts have focused on Free software support for Nvidia drivers, the Nouveau project.

The way things are going it's not looking good for open source support for ATI.

The r300 project only was able to produce stable, workable drivers, until after the cards are mostly obsolete. And still they are having problems with specific cards and still the drivers are not well optimized and don't come close to using all the features in the cards.

Reverse engineering hardware and finding hardware bugs and work around for hardware bugs is hugely time consuming. That just adds to the difficulty of producing high performance 3D drivers.

So is it realy worth their effort to deal with ATI?

I think it's just easier to tell people that if they intend to use Linux for any purpose, now or into the future, that they should avoid ATI like the plague.

I just feel sorry for all those people owning ATI powered laptops and such that didn't know better at the time they bought those things.