Open source acceleration on r600/r700

Well, this is something that we, Radeon owners, have surely been waiting for. Thanks to the hard work of X.org and Ubuntu developers, an open source driver with 2D and XVideo acceleration support has recently hit the repositories (changelog). But, unfortunately, the driver still depends on kernel support, that has not been uploaded yet.

Anyway, if you don't want to wait for the kernel packages, the X.org wiki has cool instructions on building the latest DRM from source, and they just worked for me like a charm! For some extra confidence, I also did a "depmod -a" and "update-initramfs -u" after copying the modules in their places.

If everything goes well, here's what you'll get in your Xorg.0.log:

(==) RADEON(0): Using EXA acceleration architecture
(II) RADEON(0): Acceleration enabled

And of course, the difference is easily noticeable. Especially if you like moving and switching windows :) The video support is also outstanding. Even high resolution clips (like Big Buck Bunny or the Ruby videos) play VERY smoothly and are quickly switched into and out of fullscreen. Really cool! And they say, EXA acceleration should work with radeonhd as well by now, but I haven't tried this myself yet.