Slashdot Mirror

Malware in the closed binary blob firmware and bootloader. Closed gpu libs. Not being able to boot your own kernel. Not being able to boot off the block device or location of choice. To name a few.

Lots of people care. That is why so many people reverse engineer their ARM tablets and cell phones. That is why there are open firmware projects like http://www.coreboot.org/ coreboot, http://kexecboot.org/ kexecboot and http://www.denx.de/wiki/U-Boot u-boot. Take a look at the http://wiki.opengraphics.org/tiki-index.php Open Graphics Project or http://elinux.org/Embedded_Open_Modular_Architecture/PCMCIA mentioned earlier in the comments here for what and why.

The OpenRISC spec supports 64-bit, but the current implementation is 32 bit. I agree with the GPU part. There is a cool project that has built a FPGA-based graphics card http://wiki.opengraphics.org/ . One problem with the open source hardware community is that it is a bit fragmented. Would be awesome to combine a lot of the efforts.

Or http://wiki.opengraphics.org/ or http://www.arduino.cc/

It is time we start the Free Hardware Foundation (FHF).

Their main site seems to be broken right now, but there's the OGP:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Graphics_Project
• http://wiki.opengraphics.org/tiki-index.php?page=OGC+FeatureList
• http://opengraphics.org/ (currently broken)

They won't be cheap or fast (and they're not out yet), but they're completely open, including the hardware design.

Their main site seems to be broken right now, but there's the OGP:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Graphics_Project
• http://wiki.opengraphics.org/tiki-index.php?page=OGC+FeatureList
• http://opengraphics.org/ (currently broken)

They won't be cheap or fast (and they're not out yet), but they're completely open, including the hardware design.

The question is: what else to use?
Intel has a pretty good reputation for its OSS graphics drivers, but the hardware is only adequate for office PCs. For current 3D games their integrated graphics lack the necessary performance.

ATI and NVIDIA have much faster hardware. Binary Linux drivers from NVIDIA work pretty well while ATI's have a horrible reputation, but NVIDIA don't release hardware specifications like ATI does. That means I expect the development of open source drivers to progress much better for ATI. AFAIK the Nouveau open source drivers for NVIDIA rely on reverse engineering which is a rather slow undertaking.

When I built my current PC two years ago, I voted with my money for NVIDIA. ATI's release of hardware specs was promised at the time, but they had not actually released anything yet. My next PC will probably have an ATI card.

The "open source graphics card" (http://wiki.opengraphics.org/tiki-index.php) has reached the prototype stage, but I doubt it will see mass sales anytime soon. In terms of performance, that card seems to be similar to recent integrated graphics, and there we already have Intel chipsets with good OSS support.

http://wiki.opengraphics.org/tiki-index.php

Though this might be relevant somehow:
OpenGraphics

Consider the OGD1 card from the Open Graphics
Project. Big FPGA, and video outputs (2x DVI 1x s-video)

http://opengraphics.org/

I wonder how many people are willing to pay a 25% premium to run Windows on Amazon EC2?

It may be difficult for any startup, open source or not, to gain a foothold here. But when you're looking to reduce costs as much as possible, to sell a utility computing model, I don't see why you'd be adding extra software costs right away.

In fact, the summary mentions other things, like Puppet and Hadoop, that make an impact.

I don't know that anyone is claiming open source could provide such a service, any more than open source could provide free and open hardware. Even if you have a completely open design, you still probably need some sort of corporate entity to build and sell it.

But at the same time, I don't see why any "cloud" provider in their right mind would pass up things like Puppet or Eucalyptus. Indeed, this is exactly the kind of place where the typical objections to open source hold no water -- merely providing a service is most likely not going to force you to disclose any changes, and that assumes you have to change the project at all.

Amen. I wish the open graphics project the best of luck -- imagine how much better our drivers could be if we had real documentation for our graphics hardware!

What's probably going to happen is that the second that the OGP starts to get a decent graphics card, some of the major vendors will start releasing documentation and/or much better Free Software drivers. And hopefully everyone will benefit.

Are you interested in open source hardware? Bothered by having trouble making PC hardware work with your OS? How about donating to the OGP?

www.opengraphics.org
www.openhardwarefoundation.org

http://wiki.opengraphics.org/tiki-index.php?page=OGD1

Or you could put your money where your mouth is and support the Open Graphics Project. If this gets off the ground, the other manufacturers might wake up.

Please try and support The Open Graphics Project.
http://wiki.opengraphics.org./tiki-index.php?page= AboutOpenGraphics

You're looking for the Open Graphics Project. But hardware is hard to design and expensive to fab, you're not going to get an Xtreme3D Graphics Accelerator competitive with the latest from NVIDIA or ATI.

I don't believe it is ESR's position that you should write Free code except when you can make a lot more money by writing un-Free code. He's a bit more of a capitalist and right-winger, but he's the kind of right-winger to whom Freedom is important.

ATI used to produce a full spec for their cards. We should encourage them to return to that practice, because then we will have better computers. It's that simple.

If they instead want to produce hardware dongles for proprietary code, given what we know about how a proprietary code computer industry evolves into crap, we should not buy their stuff and should even support projects such as the open graphics card ( http://wiki.opengraphics.org/tiki-index.php ) until ATI goes out of business and is run by someone who wants to sell us something we want to buy.

If, as a marketplace, we pay ATI to make more money for keeping secrets, than for producing good hardware, then we will get what we pay for -- bad hardware and closed drivers. It's a free market, and you should buy neither ATI now NVidia nor Intel if they aren't selling what you want; fortunately, since 3D acceleration is a trivial unnecessary decoration on a computer, and there are plenty of old ATI Radeon 9500s for sale on Ebay, you don't have to send your money to these guys if you don't want to.

Check out:

http://www.openhardwarefoundation.org/
http://www.opengraphics.org/

A lot of people are really taking this idea of open hardware designs very seriously, especially in graphics, where we have a really hard time getting docs out of GPU vendors to write Free Software drivers. One of the commenters on this article said something about how he and his colleagues who know how to do this stuff have no interest in doing it outside of work. This isn't true for everyone. The founder and leader of the Open Graphics Project is an experienced graphics chip designer.

The OpenGraphics.org project will release a 3D OpenGL enabled graphics card with full specifications and schematics so that FOSS developers can write open source drivers for Linux and BSDs. The consumer graphics card (code-named OGA) will be release after a development board (code-named OGD1) is produced. The key step is to make enough revenue (around $2 million) from selling the multi-function development board to fund the mass production of the consumer card.

Unless there is a wealthy individual / corporation out there who is willing to invest in order to manufacture this card earlier. The FOSS-friendly card will surely have a big appeal in Linux circles.

It's things like this that make it clear that we need the OpenGraphics project. If you can, then please support them and let's get a truly open graphics card out there that does decent 2D and 3D with truly open drivers.

It's amazing to me how many people think bullying and mass-emailing is going to get a krufty old-school company like Intel to do ANYTHING. Even IBM isn't much of an exception, because they keep their proprietary and open source stuff carefully separated, and Sun's OpenSparc was already an open standard before they release the source code. These companies have markets much larger than open source users that don't care at all about open source!

In my opinion, the only way we're ever going to have truly open hardware is for us to develop it ourselves. In case you weren't paying attention, the Open Graphics Project already has hardware!!!

Yes, it's an early step in the process, but when volunteer open source development meets up with expensive hardware production, things tend to go a bit slowly. But engineering samples are currently undergoing tests, and the project members are working on test benches for it.

I want to slap anyone who even bothers to call Intel. It's a total waste of energy that they could be spending on a real organization that is really producing open source hardware, with schematics and source code online. Oh, and we're not talking about just releasing documentation on how their hardware works. Their entire hardware development process is out in the open and open source. Not only can you read about how this stuff works, but you can look at every level of detail, down to how the hardware is wired.

The only way we're ever going to get good graphics hardware for open source is to make it ourselves!

In my opinion, the real solution is for us to start designing our own hardware.

www.opencores.org is a repository of open source hardware designs.
www.opencollector.org is another.
The Open Graphics Project is about to release real open hardware. They're focusing on graphics right now, but they have aspirations toward other kinds of hardware.

Rather than giving up control of the software just to get the hardware, take control of the hardware!

(BTW, I'm much less concerned about proprietary apps than closed-source drivers. Drivers are a major source of potential system instability. They need to be open source. Applications are isolated to their own process spaces and can't crash the system when they crash. I think a closed-source iTunes for Linux would be wonderful!)

Basically, you're asking for the software interface of the hardware to be standardized and abstracted. In a nut shell, hardware is expensive and software is cheap. Anything you can do in software with little or no impact on your performance requirements is something you should not do in hardware. ATI and nVidia have radically different approaches to GPU design. With differing internal structures, the interfaces exposed to drivers is also going to be radically different, but there's no reason not to use cheap CPU cycles to create the abstraction rather than expensive logic gates in hardware.

Hardware is expensive because the cost of a chip goes up roughtly with the fourth power of the logic area.

IMHO, the best solution to the problem of drivers for Linux is simply to not buy hardware that doesn't have open source drivers. Do you think that makes life difficult? The Open Graphics Project has opinions about that.

The Open Graphics Project comes up pretty high in google searches. When someone writes an article like this, it tells me that they didn't even TRY to do their homework. From reading the article (yeah, I read it!), it would appear that the author isn't seriously looking for alternatives. It's reasonable enough to evaluate ATI and nVidia drivers. What's unreasonable is to make everything totally one-sided by not mentioning the alternatives.

Which 3D graphics card would you recommend if I wanted to make a top noch "open" gaming machine?. I would like a card whose drivers could exploit all the hardware properties

Sorry. Got the address wrong. The open graphics project is at www.opengraphics.ORG.

If you like this sort of thing, you might consider getting involved with the project.

Help build and support a real open solution. http://opengraphics.org/

So what happened to the OpenGraphics.org project that aimed to create a graphics card with fully published specs and open source drivers? If they actually get it working, there will be no more debate as to what video card Linux users (and manufacturers of Linux-capable computers) should buy.

Given the fact that the best open source drivers currently available are those for ATI cards, and that those cards are 15% as efficient in Linux as in Windows, the Open Graphics card will have no competition.

If you can't buy a monitor with analog or DVI, then open-standards hardware projects (like the Open Graphics Project) will be shut out. This isn't just about protecting IP rights. This is a direct attack at Free Software in general.

Someone there must have been paying attention to the Open Graphics Project. They're working on a design for an open source graphics card. Naturally, the drivers will be open source, but ultimately, so will the Verilog code to the internal GPU design.

Never had that problem.

If its tit-for-tat you want try *not* to tell me an ATI horror story [..]

[..] until you or one of the other idiots creates a serious video card with an open specification that meets or exceeds the current offerings all your doing is blowing smoke.

Of course its fine to flame about drivers but you don't even question the hardware...

If this guy was really interested in Linux desktop graphics, he would have at least made a passing mention of the Open Graphics Project ( http://opengraphics.org/ ).

FreeBSD gives up control over portions of it's system in return for some limited additonal functionality.

They accept certain optional components as a binary. That is nowhere near giving up control over their system, none of those components are reqzured parts of the system, rather, they are things that help make the system more convenient for users.

Theo cares about freedom, sure, but he also really only cares about the things he happens to need himself.

I happen to have been involved in the Open Graphics project. I approached Theo early this year to see if there would be a possibility of OpenBSD participating in a project to create a fully documented and supported piece of graphics hardware. Obviously he has no need for it since the reply was a one word email saying NO. (and I am not surprised by getting a somewhat blunt response from him, thats not the point, the point is that he simply has no nterest in things if they do not directly serve his own needs, so much for him and his fight for freedom)

One could also point at the hilarious situation regarding SMP. Till recently suggesting OpenBSD could use SMP support would get you anything between a somwhat polite "we disagree" to a flamy "fuck off". Yet it has (abeit limited) SMP support now since one (or more?) of its core team members had a need for it.

Dont get me wrong btw, its their good right to support the things they want and to ignore everything else. When I need an OS for some purpose I will go to people who actually care about what others then themselves might want to do with their product however.

Huh. Slashdot screwed that up. Let's try again: The Open Graphics Project.

What they do that others [in the OSS world] cannot do is produce a GPU capable of pushing polygons.

Help is on the way. TechSource, which makes video cards for air traffic control and medical applications has started work on a desktop/workstation card that will be able to accelerate enough of X.org and OpenGL to be usable. It won't blow your socks off in gaming, but for many users that's not important anyway. More importantly, the specs will be fully open. More information on OpenGraphics.org.

Oh and yes, it's been mentioned on Slashdot before.

Join us and help out!

Lourens

Part of the problem with gaming on Linux is the derth of open source graphics drivers. Furthermore, closed-source drivers for Linux tend to be substandard compared to their Windows counterparts. As such, I'd like to point to the Open Graphics Project.

I hope the Open Graphics project will make inroads into the graphics business, and force Nvidia and ATI to make the specs to their cards public. They can have a big market if all computers intended to run FOSS are equipted with one of their cards. And if the majority of computers in Brazil are destined to run FOSS for financial reasons, that's a huge market for their hardware.

Nvidia and ATI are really paranoid about their IP - at one point Nvidia even refused to share the specs for an ethernet card they made. The FOSS comunity doesn't want their schemas for the hardware, just the interface so that quality open source dirvers can be made and Linux/*BSD can have state of the art graphics capailities.

Looks like the authors forgot to mention a very promising project to create an open source 3D card with all the specifications available to FOSS developers, not just emplyees of the manufacturing company. In other words, they're trying to build 'free hardware' graphics card that would work to its full potential under Linux/*BSD, not just Windows.

http://opengraphics.org"