Funding Radeon driver development

[Russell Shaw]

Daniel Kasak wrote:
> Firstly, I thought I'd start a new thread instead of replying the the 
> original one, as I'd like to get maximum exposure and not just people 
> interested in tv-out ...
> 
> Hanno Böck wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>>
>> One of the most missing features for me in linux is my non-working 
>> tv-out. (well, it can work with the proprietary ati-driver, but that's 
>> not really what I want)
>>
>> Now, I heared that some people were working on that, but never saw a 
>> patch that made it work for me. As this would make things much easier 
>> for me, I thought that I might donate a small amount of money if 
>> someone is willing to pick that issue up. I also think that I could 
>> gain some more donaters via a public announcement in my blog.
>>
>> My question: Would such an initiative be welcome by the xorg-devs? 
>> Anyone probably already interested in getting such a bounty?
> 
> 
> I've been meaning to suggest something similar, but I've been snowed 
> under in work and stuff. I think the bounty idea is a great way of 
> motivating both users and developers...

Geez, i've had *months* of free time to write drivers for *free* and have
tried just that for the ATI 9200 card i have.

The failure of xorg is to document anything about writing a card driver,
how existing ones work, and how DRI works.

Even though i've worked out a lot of it by looking at source code over
years, there's too much undocumented stuff such as the dozens of card-
specific non-vga registers and configuration code that makes it
impossible to understand the hardware well enough to write and debug
X driver code.

The first thing that could be done is to document what driver code
is based on proprietory NDA data, and what was reverse engineered.

Money spent on X driver documentation or howtos is far less wasteful
than X conferences (of which i'll never go to anyway).

If i had've had enough information to hack my radeon card, the ati driver
could've been by now *bug free*.