XVideo support in xf86-video-nv / G90

[René Rebe]

Vasily Khoruzhick wrote:
> On Tuesday 24 February 2009 18:16:44 René Rebe wrote:
>
>   
>> However, the bottom line should be: showing the specs would cut their
>> development and Q/A costs for the open source OS driver in the future as
>> the encumbered driver apparently does not fill the needs of many people
>> on non-Windows OSs (be that it's simple not available [think PPC] or
>> prevents the use of latest software versions / technology, etc.).
>>     
>
> Just want to note that specs for intel and amd chipsets are opened for years, 
> but still there're no drivers with same quality as nvidia closed-source 
> drivers.
>   
For me the Intel and ATi driver (or for that matter even the Matrox 
driver 10 years ago)
always worked superb (that is with latest greatest drivers there might 
have been some
compositing performance etc. regressions for one or the other). But at 
leas the available
of source allows to choose a suitable one, and fix issues as they appear.

The quality is influenced by many factors, for me the source 
availability is one of
the strongest ones - without it many other factors (such as security 
among others)
are hard to determine anyway. And on another side the NVidia driver 
rarely worked
at all. Mostly because of the sheer lack of x86 hardware on my side in 
the past,
and for the few AMDtel boxes other ABI incompatibility with latest X.org 
server
and OS kernel ont he other. For me this boils down to a near 0 usability.

If the CPU-land would be like the GPU-world, we would still not now how 
to enable
the i386 protected mode, nor how-to use vector instructions or other new 
features
when all programming material would be hidden by the manufacturers.

It's no wonder GPGPU is not in wider use today, when utilizing it means 
calling
into a VESA BIOS sort-of-thing and no-one knows what's going on behind,
how to debug or if it works tomorrow or the next computer nearby.

Yours,

-- 
  René Rebe - ExactCODE GmbH - Europe, Germany, Berlin
  http://exactcode.de | http://t2-project.org | http://rene.rebe.name