The AmigaOS 4.x Radeon HD Driver Reaches Version 1.0

Posted by Hans de Ruiter

Yes, it's official; the AmigaOS 4.x Radeon HD driver is no longer in beta. As announced in A-EON Technology's press release, version 1.0 has been released. This milestone marks the end of years of hard work and extensive testing.

Version 1.0 incorporates some bug fixes and enhancements that were made since the last public release, which was 1.0 RC2 (0.57). These changes span two internal release candidates that beta testers have put through their paces over the last few months. The most serious of these bugs was one that could cause a deadlock when the RadeonHD_RM.resource's memory management system was in use (by 3D drivers, or the RHDRMTest2 test program).** While this bug was largely irrelevant until 3D drivers arrive (and the system runs out of VRAM), I felt that it had to be fixed before version 1.0 could be released.

Here are the list of changes since the last public release:

• Resolved an issue which could cause a deadlock when the RadeonHD_RM.resource's memory management was used (locked up RHDRMTest2)
• WaitIdle() now locks the command processor to ensure that it really is idle on exit, and prevents a very rare infinite loop from occurring
• Now lower Evergreen+ clocks down to initial values for initialisation after a soft-reset (helps with some tricky RadeonHD cards)
• Fixed a bug in the code to get the graphics card's ROM
• Disabled compositing for 16-bit target bitmaps/screens with Radeon HD 7xxx series cards (did not work correctly due to a hardware limitation of these cards)

It has been a long journey to get to this point, and it's feels great to have reached this milestone. I hope that users have fun using their systems, even while they wait for 3D drivers to arrive. The journey's not over yet, so be sure to enjoy the ride.

** The RadeonHD_RM.resource provides external 3D drivers with shared access to the Radeon HD's GPU and VRAM.

Comments (1) | 1 April 2014