So we have to admit that we're more than a little surprised when AMD told us earlier this month that they intended to do something well outside of the play book and something that we thought was practically impossible: they were going to officially back and provide support for open source drivers for their video cards, in order to establish a solid full feature open source Linux video driver. The noteworthiness of this stems from the fact that the GPU industry is incredibly competitive and consequently incredibly secretive about plans and hardware. To allow for modern, functional open source video drivers to be made, a great deal of specifications must be released so that programmers may learn how to properly manipulate the hardware, and this flies in the face of the secretive nature of how NVIDIA and ATI go about their hardware and software development. Yet AMD is and has begun to take the steps required to pull this off, and we can't help but to be immediately befuddled by what's going on, nor can we ignore the implications of this.

AMD is going to provide Linux support for the ATI Radeon HD 2000 series with Catalyst 7.9.

While the release notes for the past few ATI/AMD Linux driver releases have been rather unexciting, it's evident based upon the fglrx history that there is new work going into the driver. For the record, the lack of recent features/bug-fixes is not attributed to ceasing Linux development or scaling back operations. Judging by the file statistics, there was a lot of work to going on between the 8.38.8 and 8.39.4 driver releases while what the public seen from the new driver was just Fedora 7 support along with watermark problems in many cases. History repeats itself -- this is true with the ATI/AMD Linux driver. The fglrx 8.40 series will likely repeat the 8.20 series when it comes to the number of features. This, of course, aligns with all of the information we have been reporting for months now that later this year should be the most interesting time yet for the ATI/AMD Linux driver as there should be an onslaught of new things to come.