ATI (now part of AMD) has frustrated the linux community with closed-source blobs for their drivers. Dell and others have been asking AMD/ATI to come up with open-source drives. Until recently there have been no sign of compliance. Of course open-source drivers means opening their hardware which might lead to revealing some of their and their suppliers hardware specifications without a NDA. Also until recently the AMD/ATI drivers were no where near their windows counterparts in performance.

Last week there has been a flurry of activity from AMD/ATI's end on their graphics support for linux. The yet to be released driver 8.41 shows significant performance compared to previous drivers. A driver preview is available at phoronix.com. The driver is expected to be released sometime this week. To the miserly of Fedora users AIGLX support is not available in this driver release but looks like it should be available in the next driver release. But there is more to come as quoted in the article on phoronix.com ``Accompanying this new proprietary driver announcement, AMD will be making another very special announcement in the near future. Stay tuned for the Phoronix article on that event.''

AMD announced that it ``plans to provide an open source information and development package supporting the ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 2000 series as well as ATI Radeonâ„¢ X1000 series of graphics processing units (GPU) on Linux desktops.'' This is a good sign but still this does not mean older GPU's will also be benefitted from their plan. But our dear friends at Phoronix are asking some questions which might make us feel optimistic. Check out this article titled "AMD: Accelerating Open-Source Drivers?"