Status of ATI video acceleration support?

[Jean-Sébastien Pédron]

On 06.05.2013 11:22, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
> Greetings again all,

Hello!

> Could someone please tell me what the current status is of FreeBSD+X11
> support for AMD/ATI/Radeon graphics cards generally, and for video
> acceleration on such cards specifically, and for support for video
> acceleration on Radeon HD 5450 based cards even more specifically?

With the help of Konstantin Belousov, J.R. Oldroyd and several testers,
I'm working on the port of the kernel-side driver from Linux to FreeBSD.

You can find status updates and a small table summarizing the supported
features on the wiki page you mention:
    https://wiki.freebsd.org/AMD_GPU

Regarding the video acceleration support, do you mean hardware decoding
of a movie? This specific feature is not supported with the current
state of the driver:

    o  A bug in the driver related to OpenGL prevents the use of the
       GPU to decode a video. This bug is one of the three majors
       issues I currently have and I hope to resume work on this next
       week.

    o  Support for the dedicated chip (called UVD) was just committed to
       Linux a few days ago and will be available with Linux 3.10.
       Therefore, I need to resync with a more current version of
       Linux. It's not a priority as of now. Furthermore, it'll need a
       version of Mesa which won't be release before the end of this
       year probably.

> If I am recalling correctly, the Big Deal with all this stuff is that
> the Xorg folks... mostly or entirely at the behest of the Linux folks...
> have re-jigged the kernel/userland interface so as to put more of the
> work and responsibility for various things (e.g. mode switching) into
> the kernel, and this has made it kind of a pain in the ass for all the
> (few) FreeBSD/X11 hackers who have subsequently been obliged to try to
> mimic that substantial change.
> 
> Is that roughly an accurate description?

Relying on the kernel for driving the video card is logical, like it's
done for any other hardware. Before this change, the X.Org server needed
to duplicate a lot of what the kernel already did. This change also
opens up new possibilities, such as better security (no need to run the
server as root) and better suspend/resume support (hopefully).

So yes, it adds a lot more work to various OSes developers. And yes,
most people working on this target Linux. But I won't judge them for
that. We must admit that the video cards area greatly improved for the
past 4 years.

> When I was last asking about any of this, I gather that the changes had
> already been made (to the FreeBSD kernel) to support this change in the case
> of graphics cards based on Intel chips, but the work had not yet been
> done to support this change for any AMD/ATI/Radeon graphics chips.  Is
> that also an approximately correct assertion?

The work to support AMD GPUs is far from finished. I started the project
in last January, heavily based on a previous work by Alexander Kabaev.

> (I am vaguely curious too what the state of play is for Nvidia based cards
> as well.)

To my knowledge, nobody is working on other cards, including nVIDIA.

>   http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_opensource_uvd&num=1

Phoronix posts regular articles, based on the status updates I publish
on the wiki. However, the article you point talks about the support of
UVD, the AMD hardware video decoding chip. As I said above, it's just
merged to Linux during the preparation of the 3.10 version. And we have
many things to fix before considering merging that to FreeBSD.

So stay tuned! Once major issues will be fixed, we'll post a Call For
Testers with bootable images to ease the tests.

-- 
Jean-Sébastien Pédron

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