Signs of Life - The Screen Mode Preferences Editor Lists RadeonHD Modes

Posted by Hans de Ruiter

The skeleton RadeonHD.chip driver has now progressed enough that the screen mode preferences editor now lists screen modes for the Radeon HD card. This is another small but important step toward a working driver.  At present, these functions simply output debug information in order to let me know that they are being called. Thus, one cannot actually use any of these screen modes since the functions that perform that task have not yet been implemented.Nevertheless, this is good progress.

The next step will be to implement the functions that are responsible for controlling the frame buffer. Given that the code for driving the hardware is already functional, this involves connecting the skeleton Picasso96 driver to the actual driver code. Once this task is completed, RadeonHD.chip will be a fully-functional, but very limited driver; that is, it will display graphics but no graphics acceleration will be available, even for the mouse pointer.

One property of Picasso96 that I hope can be changed is the tight limit on the board name when creating screen-modes. The board name in the screen shot below is actually "Radeon HD 2400 Pro." However, Picasso96 will truncate this to eleven characters so that it fits nicely into the preferences window. I would like to see this increased to fifteen or more so that people will at least see that it is a "Radeon HD 2400." 

Comments (1) | 9 October 2008