open-source radeon driver

If you've ever used the proprietary ATI fglrx driver, then you probably know what a pain it can be.  (Or could be, I haven't tried 9.x where at least the dependency on libstdc++ has gone.)  However, if you have a modern Radeon HD card, the open-source driver didn't offer much in the way of OpenGL support, which was very disappointing.  Then there came the exciting news that ATI was going to release a significant amount of detail about the Radeon HD hardware to open-source driver programmers.  I don't believe that any of the code has made it into mainline as of this writing, but a number of us have been using the bleeding-edge git sources for libdrm, x11-drm, xf86-video-ati and mesa to test out the forthcoming support.  Just recently, the new drivers and supporting ebuilds became stable enough for me to enable desktop effects in KDE4 and they sure look nice.  (And haven't crashed yet.)  Of course we're looking forward to support for OpenGL 2.0, but this is where things stand at the moment:

prison ~ # glxinfo |grep OpenGL
IRQ's not enabled, falling back to busy waits: 2 0
OpenGL vendor string: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI R600 (RV770 9442) 20090101  TCL
OpenGL version string: 1.4 Mesa 7.7-devel

You can find how to try out the code yourself at this forum thread.