While AMD has yet to officially introduce their Radeon HD 8000 series, published today was the initial open-source Linux graphics driver support for handling the Radeon HD 8800 "Oland" graphics cards.

AMD's been planning for a second quarter release of the Radeon HD 8000 "Sea Islands" GPUs while the first to arrive hardware will be the HD 8800 "Oland" graphics processors. This hardware that succeeds the Radeon HD 7000 series isn't as radically different as going from the HD 6000 to HD 7000 series, which yielded a better turnaround time with the initial HD 8000 series support.

However, before getting too excited, the open-source Radeon HD 7000 "Southern Islands" support is still a mess and the Sea Islands support is just building upon that. The HD 7000 series has had kernel mode-setting for a while now but with the new "RadeonSI" Gallium3D driver it's been very slow to develop. Basic OpenGL demos will run on the HD 7000 series hardware, but not much more and the Radeon HD 4000/5000/6000 series is in much better shape. For end-users who were quick to purchase the HD 7000 series hardware one year ago, it's still a disappointment if you're an open-source driver end-user but at least there's been Catalyst Linux support going back to its launch-day.