Vendor support (was Re: The ati petition)

[Lee Revell]

On Sat, 2004-09-04 at 14:48, Vladimir Dergachev wrote:
> On Sat, 4 Sep 2004, Lee Revell wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, 2004-09-04 at 12:13, Alex Deucher wrote:
> >> The only thing that requires the use of
> >> their binary module is 3D acceleration for their current chips.  Ati
> >> is no different than any other chip vender at this point.  With the
> >> exception of intel no other vendor has released opensource drivers or
> >> databooks for current generation 3D chips.
> >
> > s/[Ii]ntel/Intel and VIA/
> 
> It would be nice if there was a webpage someplace that described what 
> vendors have done to help Open Source drivers. I never knew about VIA for 
> example - what features are support with their cards ? Which docs are 
> available and on what conditions ?

The VIA stuff is bleeding edge.  The DRI driver isn't in the kernel yet,
or in Xorg CVS.  I am told the 3D support works but I have not been able
to get it working yet, as the docs on the unichrome site refer to to the
docs on the DRI wiki which are outdated and don't work anymore.  Once I
get it to work I plan to post a correct HOWTO.  For now, you can use the
binary unichrome_dri.so driver available on the unichrome site, this is
built from the open source code.

But, all the source is there.  The code released by VIA was horrible and
apparently machine generated, but didn't seem to be intentionally
obfuscated, and it has been considerably improved since.  See the
unichrome-devel archives for details.

Most of the work is done by 2 people, the unichrome project could always
use more developers.  It's a better use of your time than signing the
ATI petition anyway...

Lee