Gert Wollny has updated the AMD R600 Gallium3D driver for modern Linux kernels, enabling continued support for Radeon HD 2000 and HD 6000 series graphics cards. The updates were made with assistance from Microsoft's GitHub Copilot.
The R600 Gallium3D driver targets AMD GPUs from the Radeon HD 2000 (2007) through HD 6000 series. Official support for these cards ended in 2013. Over the past week, Wollny made nearly 60 commits to the Mesa drivers.
The code refactoring was performed using Copilot in auto mode. Developers are now considering branching these legacy drivers to prevent future Mesa updates from breaking older GPU support.
"This series does a lot of refactoring to make the sfn shader compiler code a bit cleaner. The refactoring was done with the help of Copilot (auto mode)."
— Gert Wollny
Project followers expressed gratitude for the update, but cautioned that AI-generated code for legacy drivers requires careful human review to avoid introducing errors.