Linux Developers Use Copilot to Revive R600 Driver

https://letsdatascience.com/news/linux-developers-use-copilot-to-revive-r600-driver-026547f6

Publish Date: 2026-06-09 05:40:00

Phoronix reports that Gert Wollny submitted 59 commits to the R600 Gallium3D driver that were merged into Mesa 26.2, with commit notes stating the refactorings were done “with the help of Copilot (auto mode)”. The R600 driver supports Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 cards, a family Phoronix notes originally launched with the R600 series in 2007. Tom’s Hardware also covers the cleanup and reports ongoing discussion among developers about creating a legacy branch called “Amber2” to isolate older drivers, and it notes public coverage of a Linux policy requiring proper tagging when AI assists kernel code. The reporting shows an applied example of GitHub Copilot assisting long-term maintenance of vintage GPU drivers in the open-source graphics stack.

Source