Hi,
On 12.01.2018 10:51, Mike Banon wrote:
Hi Nico,
you seem to be misinformed about the G505s. There is no open-source gfx init for AMD (not in firmware, not in the OS), so within your requirements it's not usable as a laptop
I've had a small discussion with bridgman from AMD (at Phoronix forums) and he told me that VBIOS needed by G505S - aka "gfx init for AMD" -
- is "effectively open source" - a byte code which is possible to parse
with [AtomDis] open source interpreter
well, the same holds for every program where an open-source emulator for its architecture exists. So thanks John Bridgman for open-sourcing the majority of programs in the world! lol...
Only problem is that the last update of AtomDis was at 2011 - so, while it should be able to parse 100% of G505S integrated / discrete GPUs AtomBIOSes (because these GPUs were developed before 2011 if I am correct) maybe AtomDis couldn't parse everything for the modern AMD GPUs
I'm not interested in any disassembly.
To my knowledge, there is no OSS implementation because it's not docu- mented what the AtomBIOS byte code does, i.e. how AMDs display engine works and is configured (I might be wrong, if so please tell me and I might start to write code for it soon). If that is true, it shows that there is no technically reason for keeping it under wraps but the de- cision not to document the hardware is pure political.
Nico