AMD geeft tegelijk met drivers voor Windows ook weer nieuwe Linux-drivers voor zijn Radeon-videokaarten uit. De download is iets meer dan 100MB groot, maar kan in zowel 32- als 64bit-omgevingen worden gebruikt. Versie 12.6 is geschikt voor Radeon HD 2400 en hoger, de FireStream 9170, 9250 en 9270, en de embedded E2400 en E4690. Verder worden versies 6.9 tot en met 7.6 van X.org, Linux-kernel 2.6 en hoger, en glibc-versies 2.2 en 2.3 ondersteund. Al geruime tijd levert AMD geen releasenotes meer mee met de Linux-driver, maar Phoronix heeft de volgende informatie kunnen achterhalen:
AMD Catalyst 12.6 For Linux Disappoints
Following the changing of the Catalyst release schedule and dropping old hardware support, Catalyst 12.6 for Linux has been officially released. However, it's already disappointing some Linux binary driver users.
A Catalyst 12.6 Linux beta was publicly released at the beginning of the month but now has been succeeded by a stable release for Linux and Windows.
In this forum thread are complaints building up already about this driver. Issues seem to be the driver being advertised as supporting the Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 (R600/R700) series when that isn't the case. For users running supported hardware, some of them are getting the notorious unsupported watermark logo (at least it's something new to complain about in the foruns rather than the long list of other outstanding issues).
As usual, AMD isn't publicly release any Linux driver release notes. In fact, the limited information they put out on this driver is what still advertises it as working on R600 and R700 GPUs. Anyhow, the Phoronix overview of Catalyst 12.6 notes:That's about it, the Catalyst 12.6 / fglrx 8.98 release stream for Linux is mostly bug-fixes and other minor work but nothing too jaw-dropping.
- Application profile support.
- The R600/R700 support is dropped but there will be a legacy driver update with X.Org Server 1.12 support. Don't be surprised if you see this in July.
- Linux 3.4 kernel support.
- Various bug-fixes.
- There's no work in this driver on the XvBA video issues.
