[Openchrome-users] A little thanks inbetween for your work

[Kevin Brace]

Hi Haldor,

Thank you for the words of encouragement.
I have seen here and here comments like, "Why do you work on such old hardware?"
I think one of the reason for this is FOSS (i.e., Linux and BSD) graphics stack development has been moved from "community" based development (volunteer, non-profits like university based) in the 1990s to a more "corporatized" development model starting around mid-2000 and beyond.
Just for the record, I am not against this personally, but I think there were substantial number of "hobby" developers who dropped out of FOSS development as a result.
While it is not meant to be a criticism of any particular group, corporatized development model tends to essentially limit most FOSS graphics stack code development to the employees of the firm that develop particular hardware or silicon device, hence, as someone who does not work for AMD or Intel, working on AMD or Intel graphics stack is not really an option.
While I do not really do much "shameless self promotion," I will be presenting during XDC (X Developer Conference) 2017 that will be held at Google HQ (Mountain View, California, United States of America) between September 20th to 22nd, 2017.
The presentation is titled rather appropriately, "Reviving the Development of OpenChrome."

https://www.x.org/wiki/Events/XDC2017/Program/

I do not want to take away from my presentation, so I will further answer the "Why do you work on such old hardware?" during the presentation.
    In terms of development priorities, at this moment, I am giving OpenChrome DRM (drm-openchrome) development far more time than the existing OpenChrome DDX development.

https://cgit.freedesktop.org/openchrome/drm-openchrome/?h=drm-next-4.13

In terms of attention (time) ratio, it is like 95% (OpenChrome DRM) : 5% (OpenChrome DDX). 
I recently figured out how to merge drm-next (at the time based on Linux 4.13 rc2) with drm-openchrome.
I further updated the kernel to rc5 (Linux 4.13 rc5), and while writing this reply, I was compiling the Linux kernel on the background.

https://cgit.freedesktop.org/openchrome/drm-openchrome/commit/?h=drm-next-4.13&id=e7ca2d10cefd41d01ffa5ab6cc97d03bb21d2615

The compilation is now done, and I will be installing the new Linux kernel shortly.
I will send out a blurb about the status of drm-openchrome soon, but I am mostly done porting the code to Linux 4.13, but X Server is not working at this time.

Kevin Brace
OpenChrome Project maintainer / developer


> Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2017 14:06:35 +0200
> From: someone from userland <h_mailinglists at posteo.de>
> To: openchrome-users at lists.freedesktop.org
> Subject: [Openchrome-users] [OpenChrome Users] A little thanks
> 	inbetween for	your work
> Message-ID: <64fe834a0455c38d97a024dd05197201 at posteo.de>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
> 
> Dear Kevin,
> 
> I just wanted to show you a sign of appreciation. I guess few people 
> come by and say "Thanks for your work!". I definitely appreciate that 
> you still care for this hardware. It is usually a strength of freedom 
> software that aging hardware is still supported. Well, most VIA chips 
> hardly ever were fully supported, yet. I've been with these drivers 
> since xf86-video-via (CLE266), unichrome, openchrome and I still do have 
> a few VIA chipsets around (most should be CN700) and I hope that they'll 
> see the light of day (KMS, working MPEG2 accel., reliable monitor 
> detection), because otherwise the HW is still fairly okay for many 
> purposes.
> So let me say "Thanks!", again, for your work on a not very common and 
> especially elderly HW and the Openchrome driver stack.
> 
> I wish you a lot of inner strength to proceed and to overcome possible 
> obstacles. And remember, there are (non-developer) people who are 
> grateful that someone still takes care of these things. I also hope that 
> I'll find the time to test some of my HW on your recent releases, but 
> currently life keeps me very busy.
> Should you ever come to visit Germany feel free to remind me to give you 
> a big drink of your choice. :-)
> 
> Greetings
> Haldor
> 
>