[Openchrome-devel] Hello Everybody!

[Kevin Brace]

Hi Frank,

> Hi Everybody!
> 
>          This is Frank from China who has worked on open source community
> and AMD on open source graphics driver for 6 years. And right now, I am
> working on a VIA Chrome 645/640 integrated card graphics card(VX11) and
> found its driver is closed one. So I want to know more information from you
> on current VIA’s open Chrome project and see if we can work together in the
> future on this area.
>          Looking forward to hear from you guys soon.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Frank

I am pretty much the only person who has done any substantial coding related to this project for the past year or so.
Regarding VX11 chipset, VIA Technologies has not released any hardware programming documents related to its integrated graphics portion.
I would imagine that it is a descendant of Destination core (DirectX 10 compliant) they developed around 2007.

http://www.techpowerup.com/42118/s3-launching-directx-10-graphics-chips-soon.html

    Regarding the current state of OpenChrome, this is where things stand, best to my knowledge.

- DRM / KMS code for OpenChrome

This is where it is located.

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/openchrome/drm-openchrome/

In particular, here is the source code for DRM / KMS code.

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/openchrome/drm-openchrome/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/via

At a glance, it appears that CLE266, VX800, VX855, and VX900 are supported in the code, but I feel like the support for other devices are missing.
I could be wrong on this, but James Simmons (the sole developer) has disappeared, so that is what I know for now.
Until all known devices up to VX900 chipset (Chrome 9 HD) are supported and validated, I do not think it should be in the Linux kernel.
Personally, James Simmons is far better of a developer than myself, but I try whatever I can (I am not really a professional graphics device driver developer myself.).


- Existing OpenChrome

As you know, I have been working on trying to fix Christopher's VX855 chipset screen detection bug.
I believe it is the an I2C bus selection issue when probing for VGA.
DVI's I2C bus needs to be used to probe the VGA.
I did come up with a temporary workaround that should be good enough in the short term, and did observe that it did not break the device driver at least with my own laptop.
I still have to create a patch for Christopher to try, but I have not done so yet (worked on porting ATI Technologies r128 device driver to an old Ubuntu release instead).
    Regarding the existing OpenChrome code base, these are the known bugs / issues other than the VX855 DVI / VGA display detection issue.

* Occasional VT crash when logging in for the first time in Lubuntu 12.04 (low priority for now)
* xorg X server crash when FP (Flat Panel) and VGA are turned off and on, respectively, simultaneously (low priority for now)
* VX800 chipset ACPI S3 State resume hang (medium priority)
* No mouse cursor on the screen with CLE266 chipset in Lubuntu 10.04 (medium priority)
* LVDS FP (Flat Panel) gets lost when resuming from ACPI S3 State or STR (Suspend to RAM) (high priority; have a partial workaround that restores the FP, but mouse cursor appears on FP in many cases)


Other than these issues, these are the high priority items to work on.

* Reducing or deemphasizing the use of predefined display output table (This is easy to implement, but then we need to redo the testing of various devices since display output devices now have to be probed via I2C bus all the time.)
* Completely rewriting display detection and resource allocation code
* Support for dual head (support stretched screen)
* Adding support for missing devices in the DRM / KMS code so that updated DRM / KMS code is included in the Linux kernel (more coding and a lot of validation work)


That is my take on what needs to be done.
There is practically no support from VIA Technologies itself.
They have released some documents, but it will be highly appreciated if they can release more documents previously that were available under NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement).
I live 30 km from their U.S. headquarters in Fremont, CA, in case they want to see me in person.
Of course, if they have their old hardware laying around their office, I will gladly take possession of them since I have purchased some of their hardware out of my own pocket in the past year or so.
I still do not have Git repository access, and obtaining one and becoming the official maintainer is another item on my DOTO list.

Regards,

Kevin Brace