http://devgurus.amd.com/thread/158861
Why doesn't amd release a BSD driver?
noy Mar 21, 2012 6:13 PM
It is not as good as nvidia in that mean.
Re: Why doesn't amd release a BSD driver?
gsellers Mar 22, 2012 5:13 AM (in response to noy)
Hi Noy,
It's something that has been considered, but honestly, we don't have the resources to support another family of operating systems. It's hard enough to keep up with all of the different Linux distributions and versions of Windows that we support now. We'd love for everyone to be able to use our GPUs in whatever system they're interested in using.
All I can suggest is that you check out our Open Source drivers here http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati. It's quite possible that they could be ported or used to bootstrap a community-driven effort on *BSD. Several AMD employees contribute to that project, we've opened a lot of documentation on our GPUs (http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/) and are here to help anyone who wants to work on this. If you'd like to participate, I can get you in touch with the maintainers.
Thanks,
Graham
Graham Sellers
Sr. Manager, OpenGL Driver Team, AMD
Twitter: @grahamsellers
Re: Why doesn't amd release a BSD driver?
bridgman Mar 26, 2012 12:03 PM (in response to noy)
As Graham said, we are contributing actively to open source drivers whose code is written and licensed so that it can be ported easily to BSD or other OSes. In addition to the ddx driver Graham referenced, there is also kernel driver code in the Linux kernel tree, 3D driver code in the Mesa project ( http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa ) and kernel/user interface at http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/drm .
http://developer.amd.com/zones/opensource/Pages/default.aspx
There is a FreeBSD-funded project underway to port the recent open source graphics kernel driver for Intel GPUs across to BSD. After about a year of work it looks like that effort is nearing completion; it should also provide a good starting point for porting the radeon open source driver stack across since a good chunk of the BSD-specific code should be re-useable.