Status of ATI video acceleration support?

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

Greetings again all,

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?

It would be Nice if this worked.  (I have one of the HD 5450s already,
and will soon be taking delivery on another.  THESE CARDS ARE DIRT CHEAP
THESES DAYS!)

I'm neither a graphics guy nor a X guy, and I only barely understand
even the terminology related to any of this stuff, but I have just now
gone back and re-read some of my messages to this list  (and the
corresponding responses) from last November, to try to refresh my
memory.

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?

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?

If so, what is the current state of this work... for ATI/AMD/Radeon?  Is
anybody even working on it at all at this point?  I mean from the FreeBSD
side?

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

Googling around just now for some hints as to the current status of these
things, I found a couple of really tantalizing pages, specifically this one:

   https://wiki.freebsd.org/AMD_GPU

and also this one:

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

The former causes me to have some hope that AMD GPUs _generally_ might have
some decent support in FreeBSD+X11 already.  The latter causes me to have
some hope that if all the work to support such cards (in FreeBSD+X11) has
not yet been completed, then perhaps at least those working on it may have
an easier time of it, at least starting as of April 3rd of this year, or
thereabouts...

... or was that just another in a long tradition of Internet April Fools
jokes?


Regards,
rfg