[Openchrome-users] VIA and OpenChrome

[Xavier Bachelot]

Hi all,

As you may know, there has been a lot of noise around VIA's recent 
efforts to become a better FOSS community citizen. Subsequently, the 
openchrome development team has renewed its efforts to develop better 
relations with them. After a fair bit of discussion, some of us have 
signed an NDA with VIA, which allows us to write code under a large 
variety of free licenses. We also have access to some documentation 
before it is publicly released. We have been assured that this is only a 
temporary solution while VIA works to improve the docs before they are 
released free of chains to the whole community. VIA already released 
some CX700 and VX800 docs on http://www.x.org/docs/via. Openchrome is 
also involved in a discussion with VIA on how to get open source support 
for the 3D part of the Chrome9 chipset IGP.

On the 2D front, we have basically agreed that openchrome is the way to 
go, as it is well structured and is well integrated in the FOSS 
ecosystem. Harald Welte, of netfilter and Openmoko fame that VIA 
recently hired as a consultant, is pushing heavily in this direction, 
amongst other helpful things to close the gap between VIA and the FOSS 
community. However, the openchrome driver, while having some advantages 
like free modesetting, EXA support, XvMC VLD acceleration, and cleaner 
code, is lacking some features the VIA driver has, so the next step is 
to port missing features from the recently released VIA opensource 
driver (xf86-video-via-83.1.0 available from VIA Linux portal at 
http://linux.via.com.tw) to openchrome, and this is indeed quite a bit 
of work. Tim Chen, a VIA developer, will join us and initially assist 
with dual head and RANDR support. However, the openchrome development 
team is and has always been understaffed, so if you or your company has 
been looking to get involved, this is the right time to get on board. If 
you're willing to help, please join the openchrome-devel at openchrome.org 
mailing list 
http://wiki.openchrome.org/mailman/listinfo/openchrome-devel. We'll 
share more on the openchrome's todo list over there.

Kind regards,
the openchrome development team.