"Just hours before the start of FOSDEM 2008 in late February, AMD had released their R500 3D programming documentation. This documentation paved the way for open-source developers to begin working on a Mesa driver that would extend the earlier R300/400 series support to enable OpenGL acceleration on the Radeon X1000 series. This was also the first public documentation drop concerning 3D support since AMD's open-source strategy announcement last September. Following the 3D documentation release, two revisions were made to add in more technical details. The first revision added in just four pages while the second had detailed their command processor.
"Up to that point all of the work was going into enabling mode-setting support and other basic functionality across the R500 and R600 series in the xf86-video-radeonhd driver (and then xf86-video-ati through AtomBIOS). Right after they announced their open-source initiative they had released 900 pages of specifications and then in the months that followed they released a lot more documentation."
