AMD/ATI opening specs

[Matt Graham]

After a long battle with technology, Darrin Chandler wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 06, 2007 at 11:41:18AM -0700, der.hans wrote:
> > http://www.newsforge.net/feature/119049
> The more important issue is if/how specs are released. If good (real)
> specs are released, then there are enough people out there capable of
> writing drivers from scratch.
>
> If drivers are open sourced, but specs are only available through NDA,
> then there are likely to be problems with maintenance.

The newsforge article made it sound like there weren't going to be NDAs 
involved.  The license for the 3D bits is of course still up in the air.  The 
comments about 7000 to 8000 registers gave me pause, but I've never written a 
video driver and so don't know how much more complexity thousands of 
registers might introduce.

> These issues are important to Linux, *BSD, and all other open source
> operating systems. I hope to see freely available specs out there.

Yep, open specs = win.  We'll probably have to wait until next week to see 
what they actually cough up though.

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